Team

Daniela Barilla`PI
Professor of Procaryotic Genetics

Daniela obtained a MSc in Biology and a PhD in Genetics from the University of Pavia, Italy. She was a visiting scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, for one year during the doctoral programme. The PhD work focused on the regulation of genes involved in flagellum biosynthesis in Bacillus subtilis. Daniela then moved to Oxford, where she worked as a postdoc first in the Department of Biochemistry, investigating sigma and anti-sigma factors, and later in the William Dunn School of Pathology, studying the interaction of RNA polymerase II Carboxyl-Terminal-Domain with cleavage and polyadenylation factors in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The interest in proteins interacting with nucleic acids led Daniela to explore genome segregation in Escherichia coli in the Department of Biomolecular Sciences, UMIST, Manchester. At the end of 2004, she started her independent investigator career thanks to a Medical Research Council New Investigator Award. Since 2006 Daniela has worked in the Department of Biology, University of York, where she felt that, having worked with bacteria and eukaryotes, it was time to dive in the fascinating domain of archaea. Her team investigates different facets of the fundamental process of genome segregation in bacteria and archaea using multi-disciplinary approaches.

Dr Dimitra Papatziamou
Postdoc

I finished my BSc HONS in Biochemistry (with Genetics) at Lancaster University (UK) in 2018. During my bachelor’s degree, I got the chance to work with Drosophila melanogaster studying the effect of Reactive Oxygen Species (ROS) and Advanced Glycosylation End products (AGEs) as a cause of ageing and work in a biochemical laboratory of a hospital in my hometown (Thessaloniki, Greece) to analyse biological samples from patients. In my final year as I undergraduate student, I studied ubiquitination of proteins from uncultivated archaea as part of a Biochemical Society summer internship. I directly transitioned on to a PhD at Lancaster University to study potential degradation pathways of the cultivated archaeal model Sulfolobus acidocaldarius and uncultivated archaea of the Asgard superfamily (successfully reconstituting multiple ubiquitin proteasome systems and liposome-protein pathways). As of July 2023, I have joined the Barillà lab in York University (York, UK) as a postdoctoral researcher to work on the BBSRC project focusing on understanding the mechanism of chromosomal segregation in the Sulfolobus acidocaldarius and Saccharolobus solfataricus archaeal models with structural, biophysical and biochemical approaches.

In my spare time, I enjoy gardening and cooking/baking. I am a big coffee lover!

Abdulkabir Adenopo
PhD student

I completed my undergraduate degree in Biological Science with a focus on biochemistry and molecular biology at Durham University. In the following year worked at Imperial College London as a laboratory technician in the Stevens Group. Shortly after I got the opportunity to start a PhD project in Daniel’s lab. My project focuses on the plasmid partition cassette found in the TP228 bacterial plasmid. I will be investigating how two proteins found on this plasmid interact with each other and DNA at the single-molecule level. This project involves the use of single-molecule FRET microscopy to study these interactions.

Outside of the lab, I enjoy photography, rock climbing and basketball.

Antje White
MRes student

I graduated with a BSc Hons in Biomedical Sciences at Newcastle University in 2025. In my last year I focused on Microbiology, working on a project looking at the interactions between two replication proteins in Bacillus subtilis with Professor Heath Murray. I have joined the Barillà group for my masters by research on the chromosome segregation protein SegB and its homologues in thermophilic archaea.

Outside the lab, I am often reading or doing something outdoorsy. I also love to go caving.