LabEx ECOFECT

Eco-evolutionary Dynamics of Infectious Diseases Infectious diseases remain a major cause of mortality in the world and are a problem for the management of wild fauna and domestic animals. They still represent a threat to human societies. Global changes, including habitat fragmentation, animals translocation, climate change and increasing urbanization introduce significant uncertainty about the future impact of these diseases.

The aim of ECOFECT is to better understand dynamics of infectious diseases:

• to better manage infections,
• to deploy innovative methods of fight,
• to mobilize this knowledge for the understanding of dynamics and evolution of populations and communities.

ECOFECT builds a new expertise, based on complementarity of different communities of excellence in Lyon: on the one hand virologists, bacteriologists, immunologists and clinicians, on the other hand ecologists and evolutionists. It gathers about 195 people among whom 150 are researchers and teachers-researchers of these different disciplinary areas and methodological fields. Its ambition is to promote innovative fight strategies by putting the pathogen in the complexity of its environment. Nowadays, this aspect is crucial because environmental changes are turning upside down the world epidemiological landscape. ECOFECT relies on the modern tools of molecular virology and microbiology, on the most advanced methodologies and technologies in modeling, bioinformatics, "omics" analyses and imagery, on the new high-tech tools to monitor animals populations (biologging) etc. and on the collaboration between experimentation and field studies.