Project

Microbial discovery remains a challenging task for which there are a lot of unmet medical and public health needs. Deep sequencing has profoundly modified this field, which can be summarized in two questions : i) which pathogens or association of pathogens are associated with diseases of unknown etiology and ii) among microbes infecting animal (including arthropod) reservoirs, which ones are able to infect large vertebrates, including humans. We are currently addressing these two questions and our current request comes with the willingness for Institut Pasteur to increase its contribution and visibility of this thematic, in particular in relation with hospitals and the Institut Pasteur International network (IPIN).  We expect to identify new microbes associated with human diseases, and this is expected to pave the way for basic research programs focusing on virulence mechanisms and host specificity, and will also lead to phylogenetic and epidemiological studies (frequency of host infection, mode of transmission etc…), as well as the development of improved diagnostic tests for human infections. Our objective is also to contribute to the efforts of Institut Pasteur in the field of infectious diseases, by building a pipeline, from sample to microbial identification, able to manage large cohorts of samples. This project is currently supported by the LABEX IBEID and the CITECH, and critically requires a bioIT support, justifying this application. Partners include different hospitals including Necker-Enfants malades University Hospital regarding patients with progressive disease, different IPIN laboratories, as well as INRA and CIRAD regarding animal/arthropod reservoirs.