The microbiome is the community of microorganisms inhabiting an ecosystem along with all their genes and it plays a fundamental role in influencing the metabolic fluxes on the biosphere. Microbiome activity is essential for the life on our planet and the well-being of organisms, and research is attracting interest and investment from the industry worldwide. For these reasons, research is progressing fast in the microbiome field and a significant request of microbiome experts is expected in the future, which makes microbiome training and research very relevant.
This doctoral programme provides for the necessary scientific knowledge, equipment and infrastructure to support research activities spanning from the observation of natural processes to clinical trials and to investigate the role and the possible use of complex microbial communities. Microbiome research is multidisciplinary by definition, regardless of the specific ecosystem under investigation. Indeed, investigating the microbiome of an ecosystem involves multiple disciplines, technical skills and facilities. These are microbiology and system biology to study microorganisms in the ecosystem and interpret the results from metagenomics analyses, molecular biology and molecular techniques to generate metagenomics data on microbial communities, bioinformatics and data science as key disciplines to analyse and interpret the data, chemistry to study the metabolomics and finally social sciences for both ethical issues related to the research and also for a proper exploitation of the results. Such complexity of needs is fully covered by the implementation of this EU funded Doctoral programme. CRESCENDO is therefore a unique pan-European doctoral programme in Microbiome Science, developing trans-disciplinary Microbiome scientists with intersectoral and international experience
Such fast moving field has on overall wide impact on society because microbiome research, depending on the specific domain of application, can potentially contribute to face global challenges such as global warming, climate changes, hunger, sustainability, human and environmental health.
CRESCENDO overarching objective is the final recruitment of 10 international Early-Stage Researchers (ESRs; PhD candidates) conducting specific research and training projects involving microbiome studies on human, animal, soil, plant, food, environment or marine systems. The main objectives of the programme is the implementation of the research and training activities for each ESR, at local and network level, on microbiome research and transferable skills.
