Penka Petrova is a professor, doctor of sciences, and head of the Department of General Microbiology at the Institute of Microbiology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Her work is related to the isolation, taxonomy, and identification of bacteria; morphological, biochemical, physiological, and genetic studies of microorganisms; metagenomic studies of communities; sequencing of prokaryotic genomes; molecular biology; gene and cell engineering; and bioinformatics. She carries out research in the fields of genomics, transcriptomics, and proteomics of various prokaryotic and eukaryotic model systems, cloning and expression of target genes in prokaryotic and eukaryotic hosts, and optimization of the expression of hydrolytic enzymes in recombinant producer strains. Prof. Petrova also studies the regulation of gene expression of new glycoside-hydrolase enzymes for developing new synbiotic preparations with applications in the food industry and veterinary medicine. Bioinformatics analyses in phylogenetics, metagenomics, and prokaryotic genomes are also in her field.