I am in the last year of my PhD in marine bacterial ecology. My main research topic is the study of marine bacteria that can be isolated under laboratory conditions from different depths and oceanographic regions in order to describe diversity patterns at latitudinal and vertical gradients. In addition, I am interested in the physiology of some of these isolated bacteria in order to find some possible bioremediation agents with the ability to degrade mercury and its toxic forms. To achieve these goals, I use both traditional culture techniques and high-throughput sequencing methodologies (amplicon tags and metagenomics of the 16S rRNA gene) which are analyzed through a combination of bioinformatic tools.