Luca Scorrano

Mitochondrial biologist known for showing how the shape of mitochondria and their inner folds (cristae) control energy production and cell death.

Chiara Fama Professor of Biochemistry, Department of Biology, University of Padova · Scientific Director of the Veneto Institute of Molecular Medicine (2014–2020) · EMBO member

Scorrano Lab, Department of Biology, University of Padova (Padova, Italy) ↗ Lab lineagetrained under Stanley J. Korsmeyer → ORCID0000-0002-8515-8928 ↗

Portrait: University of Padova

Luca Scorrano is a professor of biochemistry at the University of Padova. He trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Stanley Korsmeyer at Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School, then ran a group at the Dulbecco-Telethon Institute and became a full professor at the University of Geneva in 2006, before moving to Padova. From 2014 to 2020 he was Scientific Director of the Veneto Institute of Molecular Medicine. He is a member of EMBO and of Academia Europaea.

His work centres on the architecture of mitochondria. His lab described how remodelling of the cristae, the folds of the inner membrane, controls the release of cytochrome c during cell death, and how variants of the protein mitofusin-2 tether the endoplasmic reticulum to mitochondria.

EIS2016, a Nature Medicine paper from the group of Frank Madeo and colleagues, reports that the natural polyamine spermidine extends lifespan in mice and protects the heart. Scorrano is among its many co-authors. For the Atlas it is the mammalian follow-up to the earlier spermidine and autophagy work, linking this branch of nutrient and ageing biology to mitochondrial health.

Milestones in the Atlas

A selection, not a full bibliography: only papers that meet the Atlas inclusion criteria.

Co-authors in the Atlas

People with a profile here who share at least one study with Luca Scorrano.

• Didac Carmona-Gutierrez Studies how cell death and autophagy shape ageing at the University of Graz, and contributed to the studies showing that spermidine extends lifespan through autophagy
• Frank Madeo Established spermidine as a dietary compound that extends lifespan in yeast, worms, flies and mice, and showed that the effect depends on autophagy
• Frauke Neff First author of the study that separated what rapamycin does to lifespan from what it does to ageing itself
• Christoph Magnes Analytical chemist at Joanneum Research whose group contributed the mass-spectrometry measurements of polyamines in the Graz spermidine studies
• Christoph Ruckenstuhl Yeast geneticist who works out how amino-acid restriction and vacuole acidity set lifespan
• Jörn Dengjel Mass-spectrometry proteomics specialist in autophagy and protein homeostasis; co-author on the TBK1/ULK1–TFEB lysosomal stress pathway and on the spermidine lifespan and cardioprotection study.
• Junichi Sadoshima Studies how mTOR, autophagy and mitophagy protect the heart under stress and in ageing, and contributed to the finding that spermidine protects the heart
• Martin Hrabě de Angelis Mouse geneticist who directs large-scale phenotyping of mouse mutants and the German Mouse Clinic, a platform that tests how genes affect health and disease.
• Sabrina Büttner Studies how organelles communicate inside cells and how that communication breaks down with age, and contributed to the Graz studies showing that spermidine extends lifespan by inducing autophagy
• Sabrina Schroeder Researcher in Frank Madeo's group at Graz who has contributed to the spermidine studies from the first yeast longevity experiments to work in mice
• Tobias Eisenberg Showed as first author that the dietary polyamine spermidine extends lifespan by inducing autophagy, and later that it protects the heart in an autophagy-dependent way

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