Giulia Zanetti

Giulia Zanetti is a British Italian biologist who is Professor of Molecular Biology at the Francis Crick Institute. She develops advanced imaging techniques to understand membrane transport pathways. She was awarded the 2021 Biochemical Society Colworth Medal.

Early life and education Zanetti was an undergraduate student in biomedical technologies. She moved to Australia for graduate studies, where she worked on HIV/AIDS at the University of Sydney. In 2004, Zanetti joined the University of Oxford, where she studied spike proteins on virus membranes. These spike proteins made it possible for viruses to enter cells. She developed cryo-electron tomography with "subtomogram averaging", a reconstruction approach that can be used to understand protein structures in situ. It works by aligning and averaging images of a large number of copies of flash-frozen samples, and can generate 3D images. She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for her postdoctoral research, where she worked alongside Randy Schekman and applied her electron microscopy knowledge to capsids. She moved to the Francis Crick Institute in 2024.

Zanetti studies membrane transport pathways using Cryo-Electron Microscopy. She is particularly interested in the membrane transport pathways that control the secretion of collagen in animal cells. Despite its importance in human health, the organisation of the secretory pathway has remained unclear.

Selected publications