Nowadays AV is involved in different projects where his expertise in genomics is applied in the assessment of the structure and the genetic potential of microbial communities by means of metagenomics approaches. In this regards AV is focused in: - Water and sediment sampling of the Venice lagoon, where AV has been the coordinator of four sampling sites that fall within the Ocean Sampling Day (OSD) effort. In this context AV, starting from June 2013, is sampling various sites inside and outside the Venice lagoon. The microbial communities identified in the different sites are related to the corresponding chemical and physical parameters in order to understand the effect of environmental variables (i.e.: anthropogenic and other stressors) on microbial diversity. - Inter-comparison of marine plankton metagenomics methods, where AV has been one of the co-organizers of the EMOSE 2017 edition, an EuroMarine open science workshop still active that wants to compare the different approaches used by recent international initiatives such as Tara Oceans, Malaspina and OSD. The scientific objective of this study is to understand strengths and weaknesses of each initiative and how much the data obtained from the same sample, but handled and analysed in different ways, are actually overlapping. Also, this study will help other researchers that want to undertake metagenomics studies on marine plankton to better plan their experiments. - Two different PNRA (Programma Nazionale di Ricerca in Antartide) projects which want 1) to provide novel information on the dynamics between prokaryotes and the particulate organic matter during its export to the Southern Ocean deep sea, an environment with a high primary productivity resulting from still poorly characterized biological processes and actors; 2) to clone, in a commercially available Escherichia coli strain optimized for expression at 4-10°C, cold adapted genes encoding some of the enzymes of the fatty acids Δ-9 pathway through a ‘gene fishing’ approach on the total mRNA extract from Antarctic marine samples.

At present the main research projects where students can work during the master thesis are focused on metagenomics and metatranscriptomics analyses of microbial communities sampled in two different marine environments: 1) the Venice lagoon and 2) the Southern Ocean, specifically the Ross Sea. During the thesis sampling techniques, experimental protocols and bioinformatics analyses on the data produced by means of NGS platforms (mainly Illumina) will be applied.