“Meet-EU” is an international team-based course organised by five 4EU+ member universities (UHD, UniMi, SU, CU and UW) as part of the 4EU+ joint educational offer during the academic year 2022/2023. Meet-EU has been designed to promote interdisciplinary training through research.
Meet-EU is a bioinformatics course and welcomes students from different disciplines, from computer science, physics and mathematics to chemistry, biology and biotechnologies. Students are asked to address and solve a specific research problem under the supervision of tutors at each university. Students organize themselves in small groups of 4-5 students each. Each group works independently to propose a solution to the question. At mid-course, a face-to-face meeting will be held, the activities completed by each group will be discussed and the groups will be paired to implement a joint second step of the project. Paired teams should be preferably belong to different countries. At a final meeting, each group will present its results, which will be evaluated by a panel of experts in the field. This year’s course focuses on structural bioinformatics and involves virtual screening campaigns on the Sars-Cov-2 helicase protein (Nsp-13). Each group will develop an original computational procedure for virtual screening procedure for the identification of potential Nsp-13 inhibitors. Starting from a set of resolved enzyme structures, the project will include refinement of the protein structures, analysis of their binding sites, selection of the most suitable pockets, preliminary docking studies by using known inhibitors, developing of predictive models to be applied in the following virtual screening campaigns. Hence, the project will involve computational techniques such as molecular dynamics and docking simulations as well as pocket searching and structural analysis. These techniques could be combined with artificial intelligence algorithms to develop predictive models.
Course dates: The course will start on October 18. After some initial joint lectures, group activities will be organized independently under the supervision of the tutors in each country. Regular exchanges will take place.
Language of instruction: English.
Assessment methods and conditions for obtaining credit: The course is based on team work and each team will conduct independent research activities delivering a presentation. Essays will be presented at a face-to-face or online (to be confirmed) conference in February 2023.
ECTS recognition is done at the home university and faculty.
Application and selection:
The students will be selected based on their CV and motivation letter. The deadline for sending the documents is 14 October 2022. The CV and the motivation letter should be sent as a single PDF document to MeetEu@unimi.it. The file's name should contain the applicant's name (surname_name.pdf), and the subject of the email should be "MeetEU recruitment”. The motivation letter should indicate the students’ objectives and motivations for taking the course. The motivation letter should not exceed 1,000 characters