We are recently working on the phenotypic characterisation of microbial communities, by studying their capability to metabolize a combination of carbon sources. This approach can help to distinguish the effect of various environmental conditions or treatments on the ability of a complex microbial community to modify the substrates present in the environment.
These findings can be supported by our expertise in microbial ecology, which we have applied mostly to the field of food microbiology, by using amplicon sequencing, shotgun metagenomics, as well as quantitative detection of given groups from the microbial population (qPCR, digital PCR).

Dairy Science
Food Biotechnology
Genomics
Selection using molecular markers

I would like to join a project where different ecosystems are compared (i.e. soil ecosystems, food environment, plant/crops ecosystems, especially when these can be linked to food production/preparation), or different treatment of the same ecosystem.
In this way, biodiversity can be revealed by applying phenotypic characterization of microbial ecosystems, by evaluating if the microbial communities show the same metabolic performances, elucidating how changes affect the ecosystem biodiversity.

microbial ecology, phenotypic diversity, metabolism, carbon source, microbiome, high-throughput sequencing, food microbiology

- available on Teams/Skype
- FEMS 2023, 9 – 13 July 2023 Hamburg, Germany
- 14th International Symposium on Lactic Acid Bacteria, 27 - 31 August 2023, Egmond Am Zee, The Netherlands