The Univeristy of Melbourne The Royal Melbourne Hopspital

A joint venture between The University of Melbourne and The Royal Melbourne Hospital

Dr Vanessa Rossetto Marcelino

+613 8344 8866 | vmarcelino@unimelb.edu.au

Position:
ARC DECRA Research Fellow
Theme(s):
Bacterial and Parasitic Infections
Discipline(s):
Discovery Research, Computational Science and Genomics, Public Health
Unit(s):
The University of Melbourne, Department of Microbiology and Immunology (DMI)
Lab Group(s):
Marcelino Group

Dr Marcelino works at the interface between microbial ecology, evolution and bioinformatics. She completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne in 2017 focusing on the microbiome of coral skeletons. As a postdoc she developed new analytical tools to study human pathogens within microbiomes. Vanessa joined the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Doherty Institute and Melbourne Integrative Genomics in 2023. Her team focuses the ecology of microbial networks, tackling both applied challenges in the development of therapies and microbiome engineering, and fundamental questions on the eco-evolutionary processes underlying biological interactions.

  • Key Achievements
    • Dr Marcelino has made seminal contributions towards the development of tools to identify enigmatic components of microbiomes. For example, she developed CCMetagen – a software to fill a critical gap in our ability to simultaneously identify eukaryotes, bacteria, archaea and viruses in metagenomes. Her research program has contributed to identifying best practices for microbiome data analyses, including delivering open-access tutorials and evidence-based guidelines to optimise the accuracy of microbiome data analyses. Dr Marcelino has been awarded several grants and fellowships, including a prestigious ARC DECRA Fellowship to study metabolic interactions in microbiomes.

    Projects
    • Understanding nutritional interactions for targeted microbiome manipulation

      Our project aims to identify how microbiomes can be effectively manipulated to the benefit of their host. Microbiome manipulation has been in the spotlight as a potential solution to maintain or improve the health of several hosts, from threatened coral species to livestock and humans, but the development of industry-scale strategies has been slow. This project proposes to chart the nutritional interactions among microorganisms and to identify cascade effects of microbiome manipulation.

    Research Groups
    • Marcelino Group

      The Marcelino Group works with the Stinear Group, utilising bioinformatics to understand microbiome ecology and evolution.