Pathogens-pathogens and pathogens-microbiome interactions in wildlife: their detection and their influence on zoonotic risks

Zoonotic diseases, caused by pathogens that circulate in animals, now represent 75% of emerging infectious diseases. These pathogens used to be studied independently. Although they are not isolated, they interact and evolve within diverse commensal and pathogenic microbial communities. These interactions may strongly influence the severity of diseases and the epidemiological and evolutionary dynamics of infectious agents. Therefore, understanding these interactions is essential for establishing strategies for managing infectious diseases within the conceptual ‘EcoHealth – One Health’ approach.

Nowadays, high-throughput sequencing technologies make it possible to describe the biodiversity of microbial communities in an almost exhaustive manner. Nevertheless, these massive data pose analytical challenges, whether it be the detection of pathogen-pathogen or pathogen-commensal microbiome interactions or the modelling of interaction networks linking these microbial communities and their hosts.

This symposium proposes to present recently developed methods to address these analytical challenges and test them on datasets collected during the European project Biodiversa-BioRodDis on European rodents, their pathogens and gut microbiome (https://www6.inrae.fr/biodiversa-bioroddis).