The section carries out basic and applied research on biologically active molecules. The main activities concern: design and study of molecules with antitumoral, analgesic and antimicrobial activity and enzyme inhibition; short and long-term effects of psychoactive substances (and abuse drugs), genetic and epigenetic factors in the pathogenesis of psychiatric disorders (and drug addiction); chemical-physical characterization of food matrices, medicinal plants, analysis of pesticides and xenobiotics in food matrices, study of nutritional, nutraceutical and toxicological characteristics of foods, lipidomics, metabolomics, environmental toxicology and development of new analytical methods using GC, GCMS, HPLC, LCMS.