4th May 2015.
Sebastien Gagneux, Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute, Basel
The first seminar of the series on Modern and Ancient Plagues will take place in the College Lecture Theatre at 6.00 pm on May 4th. The poster of the seminar can be downloaded here. All interested participants are welcome. Subsequent seminars will address malaria, Ebola and HIV.
Sebastien Gagneux and his colleagues have been using large-scale genome sequencing and molecular epidemiology to study the global diversity and evolutionary history of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of human tuberculosis. The results of these studies suggest that Mycobacterium tuberculosis has been co-evolving with its human host for millennia. More recently, antibiotic resistance has become a global public health emergency. Combining experimental evolution and various -omics approaches, the Gagneux laboratory is studying the ecological and evolutionary determinants that drive the spread of highly drug-resistant strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in clinical settings.
Reference
Comas I, Coscolla M, Luo T, Borrell S, Holt KE, Kato-Maeda M, Parkhill J, Malla B, Berg S, Thwaites G, Yeboah-Manu D, Bothamley G, Mei J, Wei L, Bentley S, Harris SR, Niemann S, Diel R, Aseffa A, Gao Q, Young D, Gagneux S.
Out-of-Africa migration and Neolithic coexpansion of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with modern humans.
Nat Genet 45:1176-82 (2013) doi: 10.1038/ng.2744
Sébastien Gagneux is assistant professor and head of the Tuberculosis Research Unit at the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute (Swiss TPH)/University of Basel. After receiving his PhD from the University of Basel in 2001, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University and at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle. He then spent three years as a Program Leader at the MRC National Institute for Medical Research in London, UK before joining Swiss TPH in 2010. His research focuses on the evolution and ecology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and combines population genomics, molecular epidemiology and experimental approaches to determine the effect of bacterial variation on the host-pathogen interaction and the spread of drug resistant tuberculosis.
