TRAINING OBJECTIVES
The Teaching Course of Biochemistry Methodologies aims to provide the students with a theoretical and practical knowledge on some of the major preparative and analytical methods that are used not only in biochemical and molecular biological research, but also in other fields including biomedical and environmental.
In particular, the knowledge provided relates to methodologies for the identification, isolation and structural and functional characterization of biological macromolecules as well as intellectual tools for the analysis of results and for their description.
Both techniques for analyzing individual proteins and genes, as well as whole proteomes and genomes will be treated.

EXPECTED LEARNING OUTCOMES
Knowledge and understanding:
At the end of the course the students
1) will know the basics of the main techniques used in biochemical investigations (centrifugation, spectroscopy, electrophoresis, chromatography, spectrometry, protein and nucleic acids sequencing) and the parameters to change in order to improve the results of a specific biochemical investigation;
2) will be able to describe the structural elements of the main instruments of a biochemical laboratory (centrifuge, spectrophotometer, spectrometer);
3) will know the appropriate terminology used in biochemical methods.

Applying knowledge and understanding:
At the end of the course the students will be able to:
1) orient themselves to choosing the most appropriate biochemical procedure for achieving the experimental goals defined during the research design;
2) evaluate the possible impact of variations in the key parameters of a biochemical experiment;
3) practically carry out the experiments performed during the practical part of the course.

Making judgements:
Students should be able to understand and discuss critically the experimental results obtained in a research laboratory and use them as the basis for planning subsequent experiments.

Communication skills:
Students should have the ability to convey the acquired knowledge in a clear and comprehensible manner, even to people who are not competent, and must demonstrate the ability to present information also with graphs and formulas.

Learning skills:
Successful condition in learning is the ability to read and understand a scientific paper on biochemical topic.