Bio-organic Chemistry

Research activities

The principal focus of the research activities carried on in this Laboratory is the use of the modern methods of organic chemistry in order to understand  and solve problems laying somehow at the interface between chemistry and biology or physics. In particular our research topic, broadly named "Natural Product Chemistry", requires a strongly interdisciplinary approach affording the basic information on some interesting natural products, a condition necessary for their exploitation in applied fields  like pharmacology, medicine, biotechnology, agronomics and in the environmental-ecological sciences.

• Natural compounds of pharmaceutical or nutraceutical interest
  Separation and quantitative determination, isolation of secondary metabolites from plants and marine organisms,  structural elucidation (mainly by NMR analysis and mass spectrometry) and organic synthesis
   
• Biomimetic drug design
  Docking calculations and organic synthesis of antitumor and antiviral agents
   
• Host-guest complexes with cyclodextrins
  Experimental and computational analysis
   
• Development of products form biomass
  Synthesis of molecules of biological interest by chiral building blocks from cellulose pyrolysis
   
• Physical organic chemistry and plasma chemistry
  Mechanistic investigations of ion-molecules processes in MS ion-sources, ab initio computations on small-medium organic molecules
   
• Biophysical chemistry and lipidomics
  Quali- and quantitative profile of lipids in cell membranes,  protein-lipid interactions

Group members