Marta has a mixed background in Bioinformatics, Microbial Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. As a Postdoctoral Researcher, Marta is contributing to a project at Howard Ochman lab from the University of Texas at Austin concerning the reclassification of the entire bacterial domain based on the principles of the Biological Species Concept. Her PhD was a mix between Bioinformatics and Microbial Ecology. It is divided into three parts: 1) a study of bacterial genomes to relate genomic characteristics to environmental preferences and ubiquity in different taxa; 2) a comparative analysis of different approaches for functional and taxonomic annotation of metagenomes to select the best approach according to characteristics such as microbiome diversity and metagenome size; 3) the application of the selected method in marine metagenomes from Malaspina 2010 Expedition to study nutrient acquisition strtegies of the most abundant planktonic bacteria in the oceans.