The qualification of trade marks of agro-industrial products is consumer oriented with a growing demand of objective methods to assess production, preservation and market distribution methods. Monitoring volatile organic compounds (VOC) in traces it's an approach that requires instrumentation adequate in sensitivity, selectivity and reliability. Solid state sensors give only a very limited answer to this demand. Our approach is based on the development of instrumentation based on mass ...

Gianfranco Menestrina, Biophysics Institute, Trent Division Thought to have been eliminated with the discovery of penicillin, bacterial threats are now back for two important reasons: the development of resistance and bio-terrorism. The overuse of antibiotics, in the health and food chains, has put us at risk for the rising of resistant super-bugs that cannot be cured. We have already bred new strains of Staphylococcus aureus, a microorganism responsible in the USA of 2 million infections ...

Armando Carpaneto Our project focuses on the investigation of temperature effects on sponges (phylum Porifera) and the identification of the molecular bases for this phenomenon. Temperature represents a fundamental environmental parameter, able to modulate and determine a variety of physiological processes. In sponges the first event to be recognised in response to a temperature increase is the activation of a plasma membrane ion channel permeable to potassium and sodium. The activation ...