Prof. Dr. Emmanuel Saliba

The ability of pathogens to subvert host cells for survival or replication is in part due to their astonishing capacity to adopt different lifestyles. Characterizing and understanding infected cells at single-cell level resolution using genome-wide transcriptome analysis, in combination with in vivo models and tissue engineering, are a powerful approach to understand the heterogeneity inherent to the infection process. These approaches also have the potential to decipher the host-pathogen microenvironment and ultimately resolve the impact of individual infection foci on the disease progression with unprecedented resolution. By studying Salmonella Typhimurium and respiratory viruses as model pathogens, we develop quantitative methods based on single-cell transcriptomics to track the physiological features of every individual pathogen in space and time in association with its host and to reconstitute the three-dimensional environment of infection foci.