Environmental endocrine disruptors are a specific class of xenobiotics molecules that have the ability to interfere with endogenous hormonal signaling by a diverse array of molecular mechanisms. Exposure to these substances during critical periods of prenatal or neonatal life may cause permanent reprogramming of target tissues, likely epigenetic in nature, which often do not present immediate phenotypes but can ultimately lead to adulthood onset diseases.
Our main research interests consist in the study of toxicity of environmental endocrine disruptors in mammal models using a variety of approaches including traditional methods of toxicology as well as state of the art genomic (RNA-seq) and epigenetic methods (ChIP-seq, DHS-seq) which capitalize on recent advances in high throughput sequencing. In particular we focus on long-term reprogramming of metabolic and neuro-behavioral functions by developmental exposures to endocrine disruptors.