Symposia Topics and Chairs

Molecular medicine is a broad field, usually associated with the description of molecular structures and mechanisms, identifying the basis of disease and developing multidisciplinary molecular strategies to go beyond it. Lack of biochemical homogeneity in a population leads, under the realm of molecular medicine, to personalized medicine, which is in the core of future medicine and pharmacology.

The main categories of this session are cancer and metastasis, neurodegeneration, diabetes and obesity, cardiovascular diseases and ageing.

This session explores the details of molecular mechanisms and physiological processes of microorganisms, at subcellular level, including possible utilization in the development of biotechnology products and medicine, such as vaccines or antibiotics. This is certainly a growing trend in modern drug development.

This session includes the themes of host–pathogen interactions, looking for new antibiotics, molecular evolution, and microbial metabolism and human microbiome.

Molecular-level events occurring in living beings are extremely complex, yet they translate to highly regulated functionalities at the cellular and physiological levels. The session on cellular biochemistry regulation is focused on the analysis of all processes that concur to orchestrate dynamics inside cells and between different cells.

The session comprises studies of cell division and cell cycle regulation, apoptosis, molecular immunology, and cell signalling and cell–cell recognition.

It is part of early scientific education that all organisms have four main families of organic molecules in their composition: carbohydrates, proteins, nucleic acids, and lipids. While the fundamentals of these families are well established, the recent advancements in spectroscopy and bioimaging techniques, such as CryoEM and Atomic Force Microscopy, shed light on aspects never realized before. It is time to readdress the molecules of life and “relearn” biochemistry.

This session revisits saccharides, lipids, proteins, DNA and RNA, and metabolism and metabolic regulation.

This exciting session embraces the foundations and scientific developments underlying the production of renewable biological resources and their conversion into value-added products, such as food or bio-based products, paving the way to long-term sustainability.

Special emphasis is given to the fields of food and nutrition in biochemistry, sensors and nanotechnology, and synthetic biology.

Biochemical simulation has evolved at extremely high pace, following the developments in IT technology and Data Science. Wet biochemistry at the lab bench has experienced a rapid development, unveiling the details of molecular structure and molecular interactions. The time scale reached by biochemical simulations now overlaps with the time scale reached by ultrafast techniques in the labs. Moreover, the degree of complexity of molecular interactions of simulation techniques overlaps with instrumental laboratory approaches. There is a brave new world where simulation and experiment meet.

This session embraces the most recent and innovative data obtained in genomics, proteomics, and systems biology fields.

Imaging techniques revolutionized the field of cell biology enabling the visualisation of intracellular processes at molecular level in all cell compartments, contributing to unravelling of the dynamics of subcellular structures and molecular interactions.

This session covers the forefront of atomic and molecular imaging, cellular imaging, and quantitative analysis of bioimages.