Bioremediation

Bioremediation is the application of microorganisms to improve 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 of two parts: 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.
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 (Part 1: Environmental Microbiology and Biotechnological Remediation).
The course will also provide the students with an overview of the techniques used for the manipulation of in vitro cell cultures as models for risk assessment of toxic agents, with a focus on specific cellular functions, including proliferation, viability, survival, migration, invasion, differentiation, adhesion, and angiogenesis (Part 2: Laboratory of cell biology).

The course will consist of a lecture-based theoretical section and a laboratory-based practical section.

Expected learning outcomes
At the end of the course, the student should have acquired knowledge about the principles of bioremediation and should be able to manipulate prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells in vitro by performing specific cellular and molecular techniques.

Part 1: 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.

Part 2: Laboratory of Cell biology
At the end of the course, the student should have acquired a large knowledge about fundamentals of cell culture, novel cell culture technologies, fluorescence-based techniques, methods to assess cell proliferation, viability and survival, methods to assess cell adhesion and migration, transient and stable gene overexpression, other technologies of genetic manipulation.