Two meetings at the Pharmacy Complex of the Science and Technology Campus. Guest speaker: researcher Tito Damiani from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences, member of the international Earth Metabolome Initiative network.

The double event scheduled for Monday 23rd and Tuesday 24th February at the Science and Technology Campus (Pharmacy Building, Lecture Hall I). It is co-organised by the Department of Food and Drug Sciences, the “G. Casnati” Interdepartmental Services and Measurement Centre and the University Museum System, with the support of the FOODER network.

Omics Approaches for Studying the Chemistry of Life the title of the meeting on 23 February, mzmine for Mass Spectrometry Data Processing the one on the 24th.

Both events will begin at 9 a.m. and are aimed at researchers, doctoral students, and advanced students interested in the frontiers of natural product chemistry, metabolomics, and plant biodiversity.

The guest will be Tito Damiani, researcher at the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences and member of the international Earth Metabolome Initiative network. Dr Damiani is part of the research group led by Tomáš Pluskal, which has been working for years on the integration of mass spectrometry, metabolomics, bioinformatics and machine learning to develop innovative processes and workflows aimed at discovering bioactive natural molecules and understanding their biosynthesis.

The seminar on 23 February will focus on the role of omic technologies at the intersection of natural substance chemistry and data science. The latest strategies used to systematically explore the chemical diversity generated by plants during evolution and translate it into new application and study opportunities, from pharmacology to natural sciences, will be illustrated. The seminar will highlight the strategic role of botanical gardens as scientific infrastructures for research into natural substances. In addition to preserving biodiversity, these collections are effectively “living libraries”, which are essential for comparative studies on plant metabolomes and for the creation of global databases of terrestrial chemical diversity. This perspective is reflected in international initiatives such as the Earth Metabolome Initiative, which aims to systematically catalogue the metabolites produced by living organisms and build collaborative platforms for data sharing and accelerating scientific discovery.

The event on 24 February will be a practical workshop for teachers and PhD students, led by Tito Damiani, focusing on the use of the open-source software MzMine for importing, visualising, processing and annotating mass spectrometry data, specialising in untargeted analysis (metabolomics and proteomics).