Maria Ina Arnone
Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn Napoli, European Marine Biological Resource Centre (EMBRC)
Maria Ina Arnone, biochemist by training, is a developmental molecular biologist with expertise in gene expression analysis, functional genomics and gene regulatory network (GRN) studies. After a period of three years (1995-1998) at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, where she contributed to a seminal work on the organization and function of genomic regulatory systems, she established her group at Stazione Zoologica in Naples with the aim of studying evolution of organs and body parts by comparison of the GRNs that control the formation of such parts in different animals. Using the sea urchin embryo as main model system, she recently developed a novel approach integrating various ‘omics’ technologies to study developmental GRNs and their evolution.