Population synthesis at short wavelengths and spectrophotometric diagnostic tools for galaxy evolution

Taking advantage of recent important advances in the calculation of high-resolution spectral grids of stellar atmospheres at short wavelengths, and their implementation for population synthesis models, we briefly review here some special properties of ultraviolet emission in SSPs, and discuss their potential applications for identifying and tuning up effective diagnostic tools to probe distinctive evolutionary properties of early-type galaxies and other evolved stellar systems.