Constantina is an active member of the Vertebrate Genomes Project, whose goal is to generate near error-free reference genome assemblies of all 70,000 extant vertebrate species.  

Understanding the DNA sequence of all vertebrates will enable the study of how genes have contributed to the evolution and survival of these species, as well as the restoration of the ecosystem’s biodiversity worldwide. Constantina has analyzed these high-quality genomes from the VGP effort to understand genome evolution (rounds of whole genome duplication) and the evolutionary history of several gene families (Theofanopoulou 2021 Developmental Biology), and to establish a universal gene nomenclature (Theofanopoulou et al. 2021 Nature). She is a co-author of the VGP flagship paper (Rhie et al. 2021 Nature).