Live   ·   Interactive    ·  1 hour   ·   By Zoom
 
Did you ever experience taking a drug and feeling that fever, cough, or allergy go almost instantly away? Sometimes it looks like a miracle, but, in fact, it is not. It happens because drugs contain molecules, called “active principles”, that, like pieces of a puzzle, combine with other pieces inside our cells that we call “receptors”. 
 
Receptors are proteins, and proteins in our body are responsible for almost all biochemical reactions that create life. By interacting with proteins, drugs interfere with their mechanisms of action, helping them to work quicker or more efficiently, or to stop an unhealthy process. To discover the mechanism of action of drugs, scientists need to isolate proteins and to study them. Sometimes, drugs are proteins themselves, like in the case of vaccines, and scientists need to obtain them in a very pure form to be delivered to humans. To do this, scientists usually must “convince” other organisms, often bacteria, to produce the protein that they need and then to isolate it from the bacterial cells. 
 
In this experience, we will see, in practice, how the process of protein production and purification works. I will show you how to purify a protein obtained from recombinant bacterial cells using procedures followed by scientists in their labs. 
 
Barbara is a scientist at the University of Bologna (Italy) and she will guide you through the theoretical and experimental work to show you how science develops in the field of drug discovery.
 
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