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MASSIV (Massiv Assembly Survey with SINFONI in VVDS) is an ESO large program which consists of 84 star-forming galaxies, spanning in a wide range of stellar masses, observed with the IFU SINFONI on the VLT, in the redshift range 1 < z < 2. To be representative of the normal galaxy population, the sample has been selected from a well-defined, complete and representative parent sample. The kinematics of individual galaxies reveals that 58% of the galaxies are slow rotators, which means that a high fraction of these galaxies should probably be formed through major merger processes which might have produced gaseous thick or spheroidal structures supported by velocity dispersion rather than by rotation. Computations on the major merger rate from close pairs indicate that a typical star-forming galaxy underwent ~0.4 major mergers since ~9.5 Gyr, showing that merging is a major process driving mass assembly into the red sequence galaxies. These objects are also intriguing due to the fact that more than one galaxy over four is more metal-rich in its outskirts than in its center., Comment: Proceedings IAU Symposium No. 295, 2013 (5 pages, 2 figures)

The chronology of galactic bulge and disk formation is studied by analysing the relative contributions of these components to the B band rest–frame luminosity density (LD) at two different cosmological epochs. The luminosity function (LF) of the bulge and disk components at z ~ 0.8 is computed on a galaxy subsample of the final zCOSMOS “bright” catalogue of roughly 20,000 objects with spectroscopic redshift in the COSMOS field. The comparison is then performed on galaxies in the local universe. Our preliminary results show that the LD in the disk component strongly decreases from ~ 80% at z ~ 0.8 to ~ 50% at z = 0, the bulges having a specular behaviour. The observational constraints provided in this work are aimed to discriminate among competing scenarios of galaxy formation and evolution. An appropriate comparison with hydrodynamical semianalytical models will be considered in a future study to understand further the formation and evolution of galaxies.