Valentina Loconte

Valentina Loconte joined B24 at Diamond Light Source in 2025 as Principal Beamline Scientist. Her interest is to advance correlative methods to develop a multiscale approach to the analysis of the cell at the mesoscale, incorporating soft X-ray tomography (SXT) in multimodal imaging pipelines. Her interest is to use SXT to provide a comprehensive landscape of the cell’s structural reorganization as a response to biochemical and biophysical stimuli in health and disease. This approach can inform about alterations in the intracellular organelles interaction and can detect intraorganellar changes in the carbon density.

Valentina obtained her MSc in Chemistry and her PhD in Bioscience and Biotechnology from the University of Padua, gaining experience in protein crystallography. After achieving her degree, she started developing an interest in understanding how cell phenotype and function are related. In 2020, she moved in Carolyn Larabell’s group (UCSF and Berkeley Lab) to develop methods for soft X-ray tomography to investigate changes in the cellular architecture and understand mechanisms of organellogenesis and organelle maturation.

Chatzimpinou, A., Diehl, A., Harhoff, A.T., Driller, K., Vanslembrouck, B., Chen, J.H., Kairišs, K., Loconte, V., Le Gros, M.A., Larabell, C. and Turgay, K., 2025. Soft X-ray tomography reveals variations in B. subtilis biofilm structure upon tasA deletion. npj Biofilms and Microbiomes, 11(1), p.23.

Deshmukh, A., Chang, K., Cuala, J., Vanslembrouck, B., Georgia, S., Loconte, V. and White, K.L., 2024. Subcellular Feature-Based Classification of α and β Cells Using Soft X-ray Tomography. Cells, 13(10), p.869.

Coale, T.H.*, Loconte, V.*, Turk-Kubo, K.A., Vanslembrouck, B., Mak, W.K.E., Cheung, S., Ekman, A., Chen, J.H., Hagino, K., Takano, Y. and Nishimura, T., 2024. Nitrogen-fixing organelle in a marine alga. Science, 384(6692), pp.217-222.

Ekman, A., Chen, J.H., Vanslembrouck, B., Loconte, V., Larabell, C.A., Le Gros, M.A. and Weinhardt, V., 2023. Extending imaging volume in soft X‐Ray tomography. Advanced Photonics Research, 4(4), p.2200142.

Loconte, V., Chen, J.H., Vanslembrouck, B., Ekman, A.A., McDermott, G., Le Gros, M.A. and Larabell, C.A., 2023. Soft X‐ray tomograms provide a structural basis for whole‐cell modeling. The FASEB Journal, 37(1), p.e22681.

Loconte, V., Singla, J., Li, A., Chen, J.H., Ekman, A., McDermott, G., Sali, A., Le Gros, M., White, K.L. and Larabell, C.A., 2022. Soft X-ray tomography to map and quantify organelle interactions at the mesoscale. Structure, 30(4), pp.510-521.

Chen, J.H., Vanslembrouck, B., Loconte, V., Ekman, A., Cortese, M., Bartenschlager, R., McDermott, G., Larabell, C.A., Le Gros, M.A. and Weinhardt, V., 2022. A protocol for full-rotation soft X-ray tomography of single cells. STAR protocols, 3(1), p.101176.

Loconte, V. and White, K.L., 2022. The use of soft X-ray tomography to explore mitochondrial structure and function. Molecular metabolism, 57, p.101421.

Loconte, V.*, Chen, J.H.*, Cortese, M., Ekman, A., Le Gros, M.A., Larabell, C., Bartenschlager, R. and Weinhardt, V., 2021. Using soft X-ray tomography for rapid whole-cell quantitative imaging of SARS-CoV-2-infected cells. Cell reports methods, 1(7).

White, K.L., Singla, J., Loconte, V., Chen, J.H., Ekman, A., Sun, L., Zhang, X., Francis, J.P., Li, A., Lin, W. and Tseng, K., 2020. Visualizing subcellular rearrangements in intact β cells using soft x-ray tomography. Science advances, 6(50), p.eabc8262.