The project is the result of an international collaboration between biologists, agronomists, engineers and economists, and is aimed at facing the invasion of the Japanese beetle Popillia japonica. This insect, recently introduced in Europe, poses a serious risk to crops and has aroused growing concern in the European Community for the possible dramatic repercussions on the agricultural production chain.

ESZ_Lab will perform the sequencing of the genome and transcriptome of this species with the specific task of: a) identifying the area of origin and colonization routes of the species, b) characterizing its genome and transcriptome with particular interest for genes and functions likely to be subject to control actions, c) identifying the induced response at the level of gene expression induced following experimental control treatments.

Following the initial description of a new class of small non-coding RNAs - smithRNAs - encoded by the mitochondrial genome and predicted to regulate nuclear gene expression in the Manila clam, with colleagues from Bologna and Pavia we will try to characterize smithRNAs in different eukaryotes for a better understanding of mitochondrial function, interactions, gene regulation and evolution. Role of the ESZ_Lab will be to a) assess whether smithRNAs are a an idiosyncratic mechanism of some taxa or rather a more widespread - yet unknown – feature of animals in general and b) study the mechanisms that drive the evolution of smithRNAs at the molecular level by targeting species related over different time scales.

Antarctic terrestrial biota is highly exposed to the effects of climate change because communities have a low species richness, lack many key groups and are isolated from other landmasses by insurmountable geographical barriers.

The resilience to faster temperature increase, and to the connected environmental insults, may not be successful over a short-term period, especially in those lineages with a limited dispersal ability, like Collembola.

How Antarctic organisms will respond to climate change is still poorly understood and this project is designed to achieve a significant improvement of the knowledge of the molecular transcriptomic mechanisms involved in the acclimatory adaptation during exposure at heat stress for a long time period of non-model panarthropods, such as Antarctic springtails.

Antarctic plants and invertebrates are restricted to ice-free areas where they survived throughout millions of years in isolated refugia and where populations divergence and differentiation can occur, potentially resulting in speciation. Given the limited dispersal abilities of most Antarctic invertebrate species, viable habitats are often separated by large geographical barriers and the gene flow between different populations is scarce, resulting in high genetic differentiation between clusters of individuals. Population genetics of Antarctic invetebrates is still a dark field for many species and only multi-locus and species delimitation analyses can fill this gap.

For these reasons ESZ_Lab is now focusing to resolve the haplotype diversity of many different invetebrate species from Collembola such as Kaylathalia klovstadi and Cryptopygus terranovus to Acari (Sterotydeus mollis and S. belli)

Collembola species distribution in pristine environments such as those of Antarctica is a well solid and studied topic since many years. The knowledge of their associated holobiomes is, nonetheless, still an emerging topic and very little is know on their associated microbes.

The use of metagenomic techniques on these species can therefore resolve the power of the phylogeographic distribution of springtail species, laying important grounds for further environmental control researches or species distribution knowledge.

Investigating the relationships between environmental factors and insect communities is a crucial objective both for conserving the biodiversity of natural landscapes and for understanding population dynamics of harmful insects in anthropogenetic ecosystems. Our research aims to study the impact of climate change and agricultural pratices on the community composition of arthropods in vineyards and olive groves in Chianti region. The possibility to predict how environmental factors shape species diversity in agro-systems is of pivotal importance in a sustainable agriculture framework aiming at an increasingly low use of chemicals.

The use of plastics burgeoned in the last decades to become an essential component of our society. An environment friendly method to dispose of plastic waste is not available yet, to the outcome that these accumulate in landfills or are scattered as microplastics.

Since years ESZ_Lab is looking to detrmine trough an high-troughtput approach which bacteria and fungi are able to destroy plastic in insects guts fed with polystyrene materials. Thanks to the help of academic and non academic collaborations future perspective aim to isolate and build artificial reactors where dispose plastic wastes.

Mitochondrial DNA is a solid tool for phylogenetic purposes. It easiness of sequencing trough Next Generation Sequences allows to obtain many data in short time with little costs.

ESZ_Lab, thanks to its decades of know-how in mitogenomic researches focuses to establish deep (and non-deep) phylogenetic relationships of Hexapoda (Collembola, Protura, Diplura, Insects) trough the use of this power molecular tool.

In order to help the scientific community in the use of solid tools to analyse mitochondrial genomes, ESZ_lab created a fast, open-source and ready-to-use Web Server: EZmito.

It performs data matrices for phylomitogenomic studies, it calculates the RSCU (Relative Synonymus Codon Usage) and nucleotide biases of many phyla's mtDNA.

The improvement and the mantainement of EZmito is handle by ESZ_lab.