Dr Vanessa Marcelino is a DECRA fellow working at the interface between microbial ecology and bioinformatics. She obtained a Bachelor of Science degree from São Paulo State University (Brazil), and an Erasmus Mundus joint MSc degree from the Universities of Bremen (Germany), Pierre and Marie Curie (France), and Ghent (Belgium), where she worked on the evolution of ecological niches. She moved to Australia and completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2017, focusing on the biodiversity and evolution of microbial communities in coral reefs. Dr Marcelino then joined Professor Holmes and Professor Sorrell at the University of Sydney, where she established new analytical methods to study pathogens within microbial communities. As a postdoctoral research fellow, she obtained a Professor Tony Basten Fellowship from the Sydney Medical School and seed funds from the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity.

Dr Marcelino joined the Microbiota and Systems Biology team in 2020, where she has been working on identifying the microbial signatures of disease. She is interested in understanding interactions among organisms from an ecological and evolutionary perspective, especially those interactions that lead to disease or dysbiosis. She is also keen on developing new bioinformatics tools when needed. Using state-of-art ‘omics’ and bioinformatics methods, her research ultimately aims to advance our understanding of the eco-evolutionary processes shaping host-microbe and microbe-microbe interactions.

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Selected publications

• Marcelino VR, Clausen PTLC, Buchmann JP, Wille M, Iredell JR, Meyer W, Lund O, Sorrell TC, and Holmes EC (2020) CCMetagen: comprehensive and accurate identification of eukaryotes and prokaryotes in metagenomic data. Genome Biology.  21: 1.

• Marcelino VR, Holmes EC and Sorrell TC (2020) The use of taxon-specific reference databases compromises metagenomic classification. BMC Genomics, 21: 1.

• Marcelino VR, Wille M, Hurt AC, González-Acuña D, Klaassen M, Eden JS, Shi M, Iredell JR, Sorrell JR and Holmes EC (2019) Meta-transcriptomics reveals a diverse antibiotic resistance gene pool in avian microbiomes. BMC Biology, 17:31.

• Marcelino VR and Verbruggen H (2016) Multi-marker metabarcoding of coral skeletons reveals a rich microbiome and diverse evolutionary origins of endolithic algae. Scientific Reports, 6: 31508.

• Marcelino VR, Cremen CM, Jackson CJ, Larkum AWD and Verbruggen H (2016) Evolutionary dynamics of chloroplast genomes in low light: a case study of the endolithic green alga Ostreobium quekettii. Genome Biology and Evolution, 8: 2939–2951.