  We present selected results on the properties of strange and heavy-flavoured
mesons in a hot and dense nuclear medium, with emphasis in selfconsistent
coupled-channel approaches based on the chiral Lagrangian. In the strangeness
sector, we discuss how the enhanced reactivity of light strange vectors at FAIR
conditions can be tied to in-medium effects on their predominant decay modes
(e.g. $\bar K^*\to\bar K \pi$) and to the excitation of strange baryons in
vector-meson nucleon interactions. In the heavy-flavour sector, we focus on
recent determinations of the transport coefficients of charmed and bottomed
mesons in a hadron gas at vanishing baryonic chemical potential. We comment on
the role of microscopic transport simulations to establish a connection between
theoretical models and experimental observables from heavy-ion collisions.
