Daniele Ghezzi

Università degli Studi di Urbino "Carlo Bo" | UNIURB

"Terre Calde di Medolla" (TCM) (literally, "Hot Lands of Medolla") refers to a farming area in Italy with anomalously high temperatures and diffuse emissions of biogenic CO2, which has been linked to CH4 oxidation processes from a depth of 0.7 m to the surface. We herein assessed the composition of the total bacterial community and diversity of met...

The outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic highlighted the worldwide lack of surgical masks and personal protective equipment, which represent the main defense available against respiratory diseases as COVID-19. At the time, masks shortage was dramatic in Italy, the first European country seriously hit by the pandemic: aiming to address the emergency and...

Ceramic tiles are bacteriostatic materials; however, the COVID-19 emergency has pushed tile producers to improve surfaces’ antibacterial properties. The aim of this work was to validate a silver-based antibacterial treatment applied to porcelain stoneware tiles based on natural and waste materials, thus correlating surface functionalization to tile...

The thermal spring of Fetida Cave, a still active sulfuric acid cave opening at sea level and located in Santa Cesarea Terme, southeastern Salento (Apulia region, Southern Italy) hosts abundant floating white filaments. The white filaments were mainly composed of sulfur crystals surrounded by microbial mass of the phyla Epsilonbacteraeota, Proteoba...

In an aquifer-aquitard system in the subsoil of the city of Ferrara (Emilia-Romagna region, northern Italy) highly contaminated with chlorinated aliphatic toxic organics such as trichloroethylene (TCE) and tetrachloroethylene (PCE), a strong microbial-dependent dechlorination activity takes place during migration of contaminants through shallow org...

The orthoquartzite Imawarì Yeuta cave hosts exceptional silica speleothems and represents a unique model system to study the geomicrobiology associated to silica amorphization processes under aphotic and stable physical–chemical conditions. In this study, three consecutive evolution steps in the formation of a peculiar blackish coralloid silica spe...

Orthopedic infections pose severe societal and economic burden and interfere with the capability of the implanted devices to integrate in the host bone, thus significantly increasing implants failure rate. To address infection and promote integration, here nanostructured antibacterial and bioactive thin films are proposed, obtained, for the first t...

Fetida Cave is an active sulfuric acid cave influenced by seawater, showing abundant microbial communities that organize themselves under three main different morphologies: water filaments, vermiculations and moonmilk deposits. These biofilms/deposits have different cave distribution, pH, macro-and microelement and mineralogical composition, carbon...

Santa Cesarea Terme (provincia di Lecce) rappresenta l’unica area del Salento, e in generale della regione Puglia, nella quale siano state documentate grotte ipogeniche. Questa area è caratterizzata dalla risalita di fluidi termali sulfurei che si miscelano sia con le acque di precipitazione meteorica che con quelle marine. Le quattro grotte sulfur...

Chemical mobility of crystalline and amorphous SiO2 plays a fundamental role in several geochemical and biological processes, with silicate minerals being the most abundant components of the Earth’s crust. Although the oldest evidences of life on Earth are fossilized in microcrystalline silica deposits, little is known about the functional role tha...

Caves carved in Tepui quartz-sandstone table mountains (Venezuela) are among the most unexplored and untouched places on Earth. For example, the ~20 km-long Imawarì Yeuta cave has been discovered and explored only in 2013. Hosted in the Precambrian rocks of the Auyan Tepui massif, it is now considered one of the longest quartz-sandstone cave system...

In the last three years, one of the longest quartz-sandstone caves, Imawarì Yeuta, has been explored in the Precambrian rocks of the Auyan Tepui massif in Venezuela. The uniqueness of this quartz-sandstone cave resides in its great age (estimated over 30 Ma) and its complete isolation from anthropogenic activities. Therefore, subsurface ecosystems...