Technologies

The dramatic global health emergency due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic requires new diagnostic devices capable of identifying the presence of virus particles in patient biological samples. In this direction, the development of an innovative low-cost test, which provides the result within a few minutes, which is reproducible and which can reveal the direct presence of even a few viral particles, would be of fundamental importance for the monitoring and containment of the pandemic.

The virtual dynamic docking, carried out in the MOLBD3 lab of the Institute of Biophysics, allows the identification of new drugs through the structural information deriving from the study of target proteins, responsible for some human pathologies. In particular, we screen drugs or small molecules (commercial/own libraries) against known protein sites, surface cavities, surfaces of protein-protein interactions (fixed/rigid hotspots) or structural transition states (dynamic hotspots).

Mirrors for space applications, besides featuring suitable optical properties, should be light, resistant to mechanical stresses, and unsensitive to light-shadow thermal cycling. The standard optical materials easily fulfill optical and thermal requirements, but are fragile, and the mirrors must be thick (typically 1/6 of the diameter). For this reason they are heavy, and the only available solution is to lighten them, by removing material from the back side, still preserving the necessary mechanical robustness and optical quality.

We have identified compounds that show a neuroprotective action in vivo, in models of neurodegenerative diseases (e.g. SMA, Parkinson, Alzheimer, Huntington) in the model organism C. elegans. These compounds consist of: mixtures of 22 natural extracts, 15 natural molecules and 11 synthetic molecules.

Wine is one of the economically most important beverages and may be subject to fraud and mislabelling, although that there are specific and strict rules protecting its authenticity in Europe. Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms (SNPs), recently identified and characterized thanks to advances in genomics, are considered the newest type of molecular marker for grapevine identification.