We are part of the Institute of Integrative Biology (IBZ) and the Department of Environmental Sciences (D-USYS) at ETH Zürich. Our group is hosted by Eawag in Dübendorf, where our offices and labs are based.
The Genomics and Disease group aims to understand why only some parasites cause disease and why only under certain conditions do infections result in disease. We are interested in the genetic underpinnings of host-parasite interactions (co-evolution) at various levels of organization, from populations to genes. We combine genomics and experimental approaches to investigate how host and parasite traits co-evolve and what implications this has for epidemiology.
Although we work on a range of systems in the field, our lab experiments use freshwater bryozoans to understand infection spread and co-evolution within colonial hosts. Our applied work focuses on Proliferative Kidney Disease of salmonid fish, other myxozoan parasites and their invertebrate hosts. Epidemiological games play out in the presence of complex assemblages of parasites and hosts, many of which are undescribed and whose life-cycles are unknown. Therefore, we also use environmental DNA (eDNA) approaches to assess the diversity of parasites using lineage-specific barcoding in marine and freshwater systems.
