Présentation
HDR Defense for Nicolás RASCOVAN
Head of the Microbial Paleogenomics G5 Unit
Place:
Wednesday June 28th at 14h
Amphithéâtre AGNES ULLMANN – Batiment Monod, Sous Sol 03
Institut Pasteur,
25 Rue du Dr. Roux,
75015 Paris
Title:
At the intersection of metagenomics and paleogenomics: Investigating microbial communities and human-associated microbes across time scales
Abstract:
The advent of high-throughput sequencing (HTS) in the late 2000s has brought about a revolutionary change in countless fields of research, including metagenomics and paleogenomics. Indeed, metagenomics has enabled the study of complex microbial communities from virtually any environment by revealing their taxonomic and genomic compositions and diversities. In turn, HTS of ancient DNA has made it possible to obtain whole genome data from microorganisms, animals, and plants (among others), that existed hundreds to millions of years ago, thus opening a large range of opportunities to study the population and evolutionary histories of species. Throughout my scientific career, I developed a growing interest in exploring how these two fields can be combined to investigate how microbes and microbial communities and microorganisms change and spread over different time scales.
My work has mainly focused on the analysis of human-associated microbes, including commensals and pathogens, over the time frames of the past few hundred to thousand years. This habilitation thesis summarizes my research in environmental microbiology, the emergence, evolution, and spread of human pathogens, and the make up and diversity of the human microbiome across time and geographies. Since September 2020, I have been leading the Microbial Paleogenomics Unit at the Institut Pasteur. At the end of this thesis, I describe ongoing and future projects of my lab, which mainly center around the use of ancient DNA approaches to study infectious diseases, oral microbiomes, and the history of human populations in the Southern Cone of the Americas since the arrival of our species to the region.
Contact : Nicolás RASCOVAN (nicolas.rascovan@pasteur.fr)
Localisation
Bâtiment: Monod
Salle: Amphithéâtre AGNES ULLMANN
Adresse: 28 Rue du Dr Roux, Paris, France