Molecular and cellular microbiology

The history of microbiology is extremely linked to the development of biotechnological techniques from environmental, medical, nutritional and industrial points of view. The main aim of the course is to illustrate how to translate some molecular and cellular aspects of bacteria into biotechnological applications. The topics of the course span the profiling of complex microbial communities, the development of whole cell biosensors, natural and artificial gene regulation at post-transcriptional level, phage therapy and anti-horizontal gene transfer mechanisms. The course is ideally linked to those dealing with Biotechnological products and processes.

After following this course, the students will develop a better capability to face the route of exploitation of bacterial functions in a biotechnological perspective. In particular, they will learn how: i) to screen complex microbial ecosystems to discover novel biotechnological products such as enzyme activities of industrial interest, ii) to improve the performance of whole cell biosensors, iii) to exploit post-transcriptional regulations for metabolic engineering applications, iv) to use artificial gene silencing and phage therapy to struggle against bacterial pathogens, v) to derive tools for genome engineering from bacterial anti-horizontal gene transfer mechanisms.