Dr. Raffaele Teperino
Principal Investigator Environmental Epigenetics Group / Institute of Experimental Genetics"It is my vision to understand how and how much we - as parents - contribute to the health of our offspring with the goal of managing individual disease susceptibility and preventing complex diseases, such as diabetes and obesity."
“It is my vision to understand how and how much we - as parents - contribute to the health of our offspring with the goal of managing individual disease susceptibility and preventing complex diseases, such as diabetes and obesity..”
Research Areas
Raffaele Teperino is an enthusiastic Italian scientist, who likes to explore the ontogeny of individual phenotypes and disease susceptibilities. Especially interested in complex phenotypes and metabolic diseases, Raffaele is fascinated by epigenetic phenomena in particular those underlying parental control of offspring health. Working with a team of motivated young scientists makes Raffaele feel happy and lucky. His mottos are: “together we win” and “let the data speak”.
The overarching goal of the Environmental Epigenetics group is to study the interface between genetics, lifestyle, epigenetics and systems physiology with a special focus on parental effects, epigenetic inheritance and early programming of phenotypic plasticity and late onset diseases, such diabetes, obesity and neurodegeneration.
Fields of Work and Expertise
Energy homeostasisDiabetesObesityCircadian rhythmEpigeneticsInheritanceSpermatogenesisEarly developmentParental effectsDevelopmental programming
Raffaele Teperino is a physiologist and pharmacologist by training and obtained a PhD in Molecular Pathology at the University of Naples with a thesis on genetic and epigenetic alterations in type 2 diabetes. After completing his PhD, Raffaele joined the group of Prof. J. Auwerx at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) for a first postdoc. There he worked on the cross-talk between cellular metabolism and epigenetics. Afterwards, he took a second postdoc in Freiburg (DE) at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology and Epigenetics in the group of Dr. A. Pospisilik to shed light on the role of developmental regulators (including epigenetic modifiers) in adult metabolic physiology.
Since 2015 Raffaele Teperino has joined the Institute of Experimental Genetics at the Helmholtz Munich, where he is heading the Environmental Epigenetics research group.
Academic Career
Principal Investigator at Helmholtz Munich
Postdoctoral fellow at the MPI in Freiburg
Postdoctoral fellow at the EPFL in Lausanne
Honors and Awards
Fritz-Thyssen Stiftung Research Grant
2019Helmholtz ERC Recognition Award
2017ARCHES Award from the Minerva Association
2016EUGENE2 Young Investigator Award
2006
Selected Publications
See allSci. Adv. 7:eabg6424 (2021)
Cell Rep. 30, 3183-3194.e4 (2020)
Mamm. Genome 31, 146–156 (2020)
Genetic control of non-genetic inheritance in mammals: state-of-the-art and perspectives.
Mol. Metab. 18, 42-50 (2018)
Cell 151, 414-426 (2012)
Hedgehog partial agonism drives Warburg-like metabolism in muscle and brown fat.
