Aims: The program has the general objective of illustrating some of the main applications of biochemistry in the industrial, medical and food sectors and to provide the student with the cultural tools to understand how to produce and modify the proteins used in many of these processes. To this end, the knowledge of the structures of protein macromolecules, of the interactions important for their stabilization and of their structural and functional features will be deepened. A further objective is to provide the student with a critical scientific method that can be applied independently in dealing with new scientific problems in structural biology and applied biochemistry.
Industrial Biochemistry (8 CFU)
Teacher: Andrea Battistoni
Program: Fermentations and their applications. Biotechnologies and biofuel production. Analysis of the different applications of protein in the pharmaceutical field, in food industry, in analytical chemistry, in agriculture and animal husbandry and in other applicative areas. Procedures for the production and isolation of proteins of biotechnological interest. Discussion of issues concerning the relationships between protein structure and function. Modification of enzymes and proteins aimed to their improved use in the industrial and pharmaceutical fields. Immobilized enzymes. Biosensors.
Bioinformatics (3 CFU)
Teacher: Federico Iacovelli
Program: Databases of nucleic acids, proteins, biomedical literature. Proficient search methods into biological databases. Exhaustive and euristic methods for sequence alignment. Substitution matrices. Multiple sequence alignments. Functional motifs. Classification and comparison of protein structures. Inference of protein secondary and tertiary structure. Homology modelling, threading, ab initio methods. Computational methods for the inference of protein interactions. Molecular docking. Molecular dynamics. miRNA target prediction algorithms.
