Laura Ballerini graduated (MD) at the Università di Firenze, Italy in 1988. She was a Post-doc at UCL from 1991 and later became assistant professor in Physiology at the Biophysics Sector of the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA-ISAS) of Trieste, Italy in 1995. In 2002 Laura Ballerini became associate professor in Physiology at the Università di Trieste, Italy.

She has been working for several years on the physiology of spinal cord neurons/spinal cord networks and has vast experience in using a variety of experimental electrophysiological techniques and in vitro model systems. Laura Ballerini has provided important contribution to the understanding of spinal network physiology, plasticity and development. In her laboratory at UniTS she developed and is currently using the organotypic slice cultures from the rat/mouse spinal cord as a model system.

Five most representative publications

1. M.Sarantis, L.Ballerini, B.Miller, A.Silver and D.Attwell (1993). Glutamate uptake from the synaptic cleft does not shape the decay of the non-NMDA component of the synaptic current. Neuron, 11, 541-549.      
2. M. Galante, A. Nistri and L. Ballerini (2000). Opposite changes in synaptic activity of organotypic spinal cord cultures after chronic block of AMPA/kainate or glycine and GABAA receptors. J Physiol., 523, 639-651.
3. M. Rosato-Siri, M. Grandolfo and L. Ballerini (2002). Activity-dependent modulation of GABAergic synapses in developing rat spinal networks in vitro. Eur. J. Neurosci. 16, 2123-2135.
4. M.D. Rosato-Siri, D. Zoccolan, F. Furlan and L. Ballerini (2004). Interneuron bursts are spontaneously associated to muscle contractions only during early phases of mouse spinal network development: a study in organotypic cultures. Eur. J. Neurosci. 20; 2697-2710.
5. V. Lovat, D. Pantarotto, L. Lagostena, B. Cacciari, M. Grandolfo, M. Righi, G. Spalluto, M. Prato and L. Ballerini (2005) Carbon nanotube substrates boost neuronal electrical signalling. NanoLett. 5, 1107-1110.
6. Francesco Furlan, Giuliano Taccola, Micaela Grandolfo, Leonardo Guasti, Annarosa Arcangeli, Andrea Nistri and Laura Ballerini (2007) ERG conductance expression modulates the excitability of ventral horn GABAergic interneurons that control rhythmic oscillations in the developing mouse spinal cord J Neurosci  27, 919 –928
7. Mazzatenta A, Giugliano M, Campielli S, Gambazzi L, Businaro L, Markram H, Prato M and Ballerini L. (2007) Interfacing Neurons with Carbon Nanotubes: Electrical Signal Transfer and Synaptic stimulation in Cultured Brain Circuits J Neurosci 27:6931-6936.
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