Course program
Professionalizing activities in small groups to be carried out in the research laboratories of the Department of Medical-Surgical Sciences and Biotechnology - Corso della Repubblica 79. Students will be divided into groups of 7-8 people, each with a contact person responsible for communicating with the teacher responsible for the activities, for a total of 10 groups per semester, which will rotate every two weeks following an annual calendar published on the E-learning platform at the beginning of the relevant academic year. The activities will be aimed at acquiring the following skills:
- Carrying out cellular stress tests with evaluation of the result
- Molecular diagnostic evaluation tests on tissue, execution and interpretation
Students will initially be introduced to laboratory safety and biohazard containment. The main topics covered within the professionalizing activities concern the effects of oxidative stress on tumor cells and molecular diagnostic evaluation on tumor (and non-tumor) tissue using immunohistochemical techniques. The basic principles of cell cultures and the possible responses to cellular stress will then be illustrated (e.g. cell viability tests, quantification of necrosis, apoptosis or autophagy, pro-fibrotic or pro-inflammatory activation). In particular, a classic experiment is designed and set up together with the students which involves: use of the optical microscope for the observation of pre- and post-treatment cell cultures, morphological evaluation, cell counting using Trypan Blue assay, graph of the results obtained with consequent construction of a dose-response curve. For the diagnostic evaluation test, the teacher responsible for the activities presents clinical cases to the students and promotes the execution of immunohistochemical techniques, the evaluation and interpretation of the preparations under the optical microscope with particular reference to the prognostic and predictive aspect.
At the end of the activities, the responsible teacher discusses the results obtained with the students, contextualizing them with the scientific literature. Students then learn to search for scientific articles and compare their findings with the most recent literature.
Books
Patologia generale e Fisiopatologia generale
VI Edizione
G.M. Pontieri
Piccin Editore
Educational material provided during the course (including scientific papers available on PubMed platform) and uploaded as PDF files on the E-learning platform.
