Bioremediation

Bioremediation is the application of microorganisms to improve the environmental quality. These improvements include the treatment of contaminated waters and wastewaters, clean-up of industrial waste streams, and remediation of soils contaminated with hazardous and toxic chemicals.
The course will be composed by two teaching units: Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnological Remediation and Laboratory of Cell Biology.
The course will enable the students to learn and practice the basic and advanced techniques of manipulation of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells in culture.
The course will introduce the students to the knowledge of environmental microbiology and of the basic microbiological treatment technologies to clean up contaminated environments. During the course, the students will also learn the basic genetic engineering techniques used to manipulate microorganisms not only for remediation purpose but also to build microbial biosensors to detect the presence of contaminants in the environment (teaching Unit: Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnological Remediation).
Moreover, the objective of the course is to provide to the students a deeping in a range of cellular techniques for the isolation, maintaining and manipulation of "in vitro" cell cultures as models for risk assess of environmental, pharmacological and natural toxic agents on specific cellular functions, including proliferation, viability (apoptosis, necrosis, autophagy, etc..), survival, migration, invasiveness, differentiation, adhesion, angiogenesis (teaching Unit: Laboratory of cell biology).

The course will consist of lecture-based teaching to provide background information on key concepts on bioremediation and in a laboratory-based section.

Expected learning outcomes
At the end of the course, the student should have acquired knowledge on the microorganisms applied in bioremediation as well as on several techniques used in the laboratory of cell biology.
The student should be able to manipulate prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells in culture, and to apply specific cellular and molecular techniques.
Moreover, the student should be able to present and discuss scientific articles describing the techniques analysed in the course.

teaching Unit: Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnological Remediation
Upon completing this course, the students should be able to demonstrate an understanding of the basic aspects of environmental microbiology and of the influence of microorganisms on environmental pollution. Moreover, students should demonstrate to have acquired the ability to evaluate when each bioremediation strategy would be most applicable, based on the polluted site characteristics.
Finally, the students will gain capability to exploit the basic molecular techniques to build a bacterial biosensor to reveal environmental pollution.

teaching Unit: Laboratory of Cell biology
At the end of the course, the student should have a large knowledge about fundamentals of cell culture, principles of gene and protein expression, engineering strategies to study the gene function, methods to assess protein localisation, cell viability, survival and proliferation, and methods to assess cell adhesion, migration and invasion.
Moreover, the student should have acquired practical ability for manipulation of cell culture, transfection, cell migration, cell viability, and analysis of protein localization.