Raffaele Sabbatella received a Bachelor’s degree in Biotechnology in 2013, and a Master’s degree in Biotechnology for Medical, Pharmaceutical and Veterinary Diagnostics in 2016, both from the University of Basilicata. Since 2018 he is lab technician of the Structural Biology and Biophysics group of the Ri.MED Foundation, and since 2021 he is also a doctoral student in Technologies and Sciences for Human Health at the University of Palermo.

Raffaele provides assistance to various research projects of the Structural Biology and Biophysics group. His technical skills include cloning techniques, preparation of recombinant proteins, structural characterization of proteins (circular dichroism and nuclear magnetic resonance), and biophysical techniques for the characterization of protein-protein interactions (calorimetry and interferometry).

Raffaele’s PhD project focusses to deepening the understanding of SARS-CoV-2 replication mechanisms to find out the role of host proteins in the viral replication. More specifically, Raffaele aims at characterizing the interactions among the replication and transcription complex (RTC) of SARS-CoV-2 and La-related proteins of the host, which are RNA binding proteins known to assist several RNA viruses. The project is run in collaboration with the group of Prof Sasi Conte of the Randall Division for Cell & Molecular Biophysics of King’s College of London, where Raffaele is spending a six-months training period.