Special Session 17

The new era of sequencing is providing a very useful tool to investigate the interaction of microorganisms with their hosts and their role in the animal health and welfare.
Several examples are already present in the scientific literature describing how bacteria, viruses and parasites have a crucial part in the life of animals, providing an important support and designing the concepts of microbiota and holobiont.
This approach is very useful to depict the microorganism’s population structure in many different fields in veterinary science such animal and environmental products, infectious diseases, and animal medicine, and to provide evidence of the beneficial interaction between microorganisms and their hosts.
Bacteria, viruses and parasites establish a complex organism together with the host, leading to a genetic heterogeneity larger than expected: its evaluation can explain the structure (i.e. differences) within animal population, can lead to the identification of new pathogens and can help in the prediction of diseases diagnosis and clinical decision-making.
The aim of this Special section is to explore new approaches in microbiome evaluation in animal-related research projects. Researchers are welcome to propose their works about bacteria, viral and parasitic populations, alone or together, providing the application of metagenomic approach, including metabarcoding and metatranscriptomics, to veterinary sciences and medicine.

Luigi Bertolotti
associate professor in Animal Infectious Diseases (VET/05) at the Dept. of Veterinary Science, University of Torino.
Degree in Veterinary Biotechnology and PhD in Basic Sciences and Veterinary Biotechnology.
Research fields:
Animal (and human too) virology and epidemiology; evolution and phylogenetics of microorganisms, NGS technology and bioinformatics.

Ugo Ala
education and profession: Associate Professor in Applied Biology (BIO/13) at the Dept. of Veterinary Science, University of Torino.
Degree in Theoretical Physics and PhD in Molecular Biotechnology and Bioinformatics.
Research fields:
Integration of high-throughput -omics technologies (such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and epigenomics) to model the transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation of genes.
Application and development of Machine Learning strategies for the recognition and classification of bacterial species from microbiome data.