Eva Boritsch

The topic of my PhD thesis is “Exploring the evolutionary success of Mycobacterium tuberculosis by investigation of rare clinical isolates with smooth colony morphology”

What is your current research interest / project?

Mycobacterium tuberculosis is a major, globally spread, aerosol-transmitted human pathogen, thought to have evolved by clonal expansion from a Mycobacterium canettii-like progenitor. In contrast, extant M. canettii strains are rare, genetically-diverse and geographically restricted mycobacteria of only marginal epidemiological importance. I am thus interested to find the molecular events that have led to the contrasting evolutionary success of these two groups and which finally resulted in the emergence of M. tuberculosis as a professional pathogen of mammalian hosts.

I did my Bachelor and Master studies in Molecular Microbiology at the Institute of Molecular Biosciences at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz in co-operation with the University of Technology Graz in Austria. I started my PhD studies at Institut Pasteur Paris in the Unit ‘Integrated Mycobacterial Pathogenomics’ as a student of the Pasteur-Paris University International PhD program in October 2012.