The course offers an overview of essential statistical techniques applicable to laboratories. Key topics include statistical distributions, methods of result representation, confidence intervals, and the comparison of means and variances. Students will acquire skills to construct calibration curves, including the standard addition method, determine confidence bands, identify outliers, and calculate various validation parameters such as sensitivity, the limit of detection (LOD), the limit of quantification (LOQ), as well as intra-day and inter-day precision and recovery rates. Each lesson consists of a brief theoretical introduction followed by a substantial practical component with hands-on exercises conducted on a PC.

This course provides foundational training on the use of software tools for the preparation, management, and processing of large and complex datasets in the context of chemometrics. Participants will learn essential techniques for data preprocessing, organization, and analysis using widely used platforms, including Excel. The course focuses on transforming raw data into clean, structured datasets suitable for chemometric analysis, emphasizing practical workflows for real-world applications. Participants will develop the skills to efficiently handle multivariate datasets, ensuring accurate and reliable data for advanced statistical modeling and interpretation.

This introductory course in R programming is designed for individuals looking to learn the fundamentals of one of the most widely used languages in statistics, data science, and research. Participants will become familiar with the R environment and RStudio, exploring essential programming concepts and data analysis techniques.
The program will cover:
- R basics: installation, setup, and interface navigation.
- Core operations: vectors, matrices, data frames, and data types.
- Data import and export.
- Data manipulation and visualization with essential libraries such as dplyr and ggplot2.
- Introduction to writing scripts and functions.
The course is tailored for absolute beginners, requiring no prior programming experience. By the end of the course, participants will be able to perform basic data analysis using R and will have a strong foundation to build advanced R programming skills.

The course will provide an overview of the microbial world with particular reference to microorganisms useful in the environmental and food fields and an overview of microorganisms with more particular characteristics.

The course will provide the basic theoretical principles on biomolecules and energy metabolism starting from the oxidation of glucose and will introduce the basic theoretical principles of bioenergetics. The metabolic pathways in physiological conditions and their reprogramming in tumors will be compared. Furthermore, basic knowledge of techniques for analyzing metabolic fluxes will be provided.

Polymers are of primary importance in both industrial chemistry and biology. In this short course it will be shown how, through the use of thermodynamics and some smart ideas, Nobel Prize winner Paul Flory managed to build a predictive model capable of describing the shape and size of polymers in solution.

Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive technique used to visualize tissues with high spatial resolution. The contrast observed in most MRI images can be enhanced with contrast agents that modulate the longitudinal (T1) and transverse (T2) relaxation times of protons in nearby water molecules. MRI imaging probes are often based on paramagnetic complexes of lanthanide ions and are characterized by certain limitations related to their low contrast performance at clinical magnetic fields. In recent years, various strategies have been proposed to improve the response of these probes, including their confinement through different chemical processes into materials of varying size and chemical nature. This course will cover some chemical properties of lanthanides and present various paramagnetic nanosystems as potential probes for MRI imaging.

An overview of molecular biology techniques: handling and analyzing nucleic acids and proteins, and studying their interactions.

How plant genomes evolved and differentiate during hundred millions of years.

Environmental issues are and will increasingly be a central topic in our society. This course will illustrate the characteristics and properties of the bipolymers most widely used in industry.

Solid-phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) has undergone significant advancements, enabling the efficient production of complex peptide sequences with high purity. Innovative approaches in SPPS include novel resins, coupling reagents, and optimization strategies aimed at improving yield, reducing side reactions, and addressing challenges in synthesizing long or cyclic peptides. Furthermore, the course will provide an application of peptides as drug carriers (PDCs). Particular attention will be given to the selection of linkers and cleavage mechanisms (e.g., enzymatic, pH-sensitive, or redox-responsive) to ensures optimal drug release at the target site while minimizing systemic toxicity.

Protein crosstalks as well as protein-ligand interactions play essential roles in many biological processes including signaling pathways, transcriptional regulation and numerous other metabolic reactions. In order to understand the role of such protein interactions in biological processes it is important to investigate the interaction dynamics describing the stoichiometry of the complexes, the binding free energy and their binding cooperativity as inter-molecular communication. These biochemical parameters are complementary to structural biology studies. In particular, the enthalpic and entropic components of the binding free energy directly refer to the mechanistic aspects of the binding and have been widely exploited in drug discovery research pipeline.

The aim of this course is the description of practical and theoretical aspects of biophysical methods used for measuring the stoichiometry and affinity of many protein interactions. In particular, the course will focus on the application potential of the following techniques in the field of biochemistry and  structural biology: i) small-angle X-ray scattering; ii) isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC); iii) differential scanning fluorescence (DSF); iv) surface plasmon resonance (SPR) and v) microscale thermophoresis (MST).

The seminar will provide a description of wheat, beginning with the origin of the genus Triticum and ending with a description of gluten, its technological characteristics, and issues 'potentially' related to the use of gluten in the diet.

Photonics, the science of light-based processes and applications, is at the heart of the Green Digital Transition for energy-efficient and performing hi-tech devices, and also key for novel and effective diagnostic methods in biology and medicine. This short course provides an overview of the materials and methods for photonic and light-based applications in chemistry, material science and biology. It starts by illustrating the basic principles of photophysics that govern the process of light emission in molecules and nanomaterials, highlighting the best design strategies for efficient light emitters. In the second part of the course, the newly emerging applications of photonics materials in the fields of digital technologies, will be presented through real case examples.

With the advent of green chemistry, research has shifted towards the use of waste or renewable materials, which pose significant analytical challenges due to their complex, variable, and often unknown composition. Moreover, a "green" approach must also optimize and make the analysis process more sustainable. These factors, combined with the development of integrated techniques and faster, more sensitive instruments, have contributed to the increased complexity of datasets to be analyzed, both in terms of the variables explored and the size of the instrumental data. For this reason, it is essential to employ techniques that allow us to effectively and clearly extract the information of interest and guide us in understanding experimental responses. This seminar will present practical cases as well as strategies and approaches to obtain the desired information.

Secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) and  X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS)  are analytical techniques commonly used to explore surface chemistry. SIMS provides elemental composition of the near surface layers with extremely high sensitvity. The data obtained from XPS provides the quantified composition of the outer few nanometers of a material detailing both the elements present and the chemical states of those elements. XPS and ToF-SIMS analysis can be extended into a material through a process known as depth profiling, which slowly removes material using an ion beam, collecting data after each etching cycle. Depth profiling enables a composition profile with high depth resolution to be measured. Depth profiles can be used to see how the composition changes from surface to bulk.  In this short course the basic principles of these techniques will be described highlighting their strenghts and weaknesses.  Moreover fundamental information and guidelines to approach SIMS and XPS data analysis will be provided.

The course describes the ways to deal with the determination of emerging pollutants through a targeted approach, while at the same time deepening the aspects related to the toxicity of the degradation products that form and their identification through untargeted approaches.

This course encompasses a series of lectures at the nexus of structural biology, biochemistry, and cell biology. An important goal of these lectures, and that of structural molecular biology, is to understand biology in terms of the atoms that carry out its various functions: carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen, phosphorous, sulfur, etc. The so-termed central dogma of molecular biology: DNA makes RNA makes protein serves as the organizing principle of this course. Biological information flows from DNA to RNA to protein. And information in DNA is also replicated. The central importance of the flow of information in biology is indicated by the rigorous control that cells exercise over the underlying biochemical reactions. This course will be implemented in so-termed ‘flipped’ mode. Prior to each class meeting, students will review reading material, listen to lecture videos. Class time will be devoted to discussion/questions about the lecture, review of selected portions of the lecture, problems sets.

Course of the LM in Chemical Sciences, open to PhD students and teachers of Chemistry/Sciences, with the aim of identifying teaching strategies based on the active involvement of the student, by exploiting the discussion between teachers and undergraduates/PhD students interested in a career as teachers about the problems associated with the teaching/learning of Chemistry.

Course of the LM in Chemical Sciences, open to PhD students and teachers of Chemistry/Sciences, with the aim of identifying teaching strategies based on the active involvement of the student, by exploiting the discussion between teachers and undergraduates/PhD students interested in a career as teachers about the problems associated with the teaching/learning of Chemistry. This module focuses on laboratory experiments.

Teacher training course open to PhD students. The course aims to present simple chemistry experiments that can be repeated in schools to illustrate and raise students’ awareness of current issues. In particular, the course will address topics related to sustainability, recycling, green chemistry, and the environment. Where possible, the experiments will be proposed in a modular way to adapt them to different schools.

Master’s Degree Course in Biological Sciences. For the first time, 3 CFU of the program are dedicated to a GIS laboratory focused on applications in zoology, but potentially useful for many digital cartography applications. The course is 6 CFUs, 3 of which are GIS (digital cartography) lab. It will be held in Semester II in Alexandria and in this form has never been conducted before.