Participant WP2/3
Franck Prugnolle
My main research interest is to understand the demography and adaptive evolution of both the pathogen and the host in a context of host switches / emerging pathogens. During the last years, I mainly focused on Plasmodium falciparum, the most virulent agent of human malaria but I am now also analyzing other kinds of zoonotic pathogens (viruses, bacteria). Working on emerging diseases lead me to study all aspects that lead a pathogen to jump from one host to another (diversity and characteristics of the pathogens in the donor species, in general wild animals; contacts between donor and recipient hosts), transmission of the pathogen from one host to another (including transmission ensured by a vector) and finally the genetic adaptation of the parasite to the new host as well as the response of the recipient host to the new parasite.
- I will mainly participate to the genetic aspects of the project (WP3)
- I started to collaborate with Eve on the WISHES project during which we tried to develop methods to non-invasively sample FMD from wild animals
What are your expectations?
- Managing to get FMD sequences from wild animals and better understand the transfers to cows
- Developping new collaborations
What excites you about the project?
- I find this project very interesting because it brings together specialists of many different disciplines with the final aim to understand the determinants of disease transfer from one host to another.
- Capacity building in evolutionary genetics in Zimbabwe
- Zimbabwe
- Otto et al. 2018. Nat. Microbiology
- Bittome-Essono 2016. eLife
- Daron et al. 2020. BioRxiv.