Valeria Bianciotto

Valeria Bianciotto is currently senior researcher scientist at the Institute for Sustainable Plant Protection (IPSP) of CNR (Turin, Italy). She works in a research team that analyses soil microorganisms’ communities and their potential for use as biofertilizers and biostimulants in plants. Her research has focused on the interactions between soil bacteria and symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi and on the study of a population of bacteria living inside the cytoplasm of these fungi. In the last decade she studied the biodiversity of soil microorganisms in natural and agricultural ecosystems using metabarcoding and metagenomic approaches. More recently, in collaboration with Institute of Systematics, Evolution and Biodiversity (ISYEB) affiliated to the CNRS, Sorbonne University and the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, she started studies in the field of paleomicrobiology analyzing the microbial communities preserved in herbaria within roots and their associated soils.