Workshop description

Workshop 1 : "Ecology and evolution concepts for disease understanding and prevention"

Evolutionary biology and medicine (both human and veterinary) establish more and more concrete bridges.  This interdisciplinary approach appears necessary nowadays, as recently demonstrated by advances in genomics, the evolution of bacterial resistance to antibiotics in hospitals, the discovery of various functions of microbiota, the evidence of epigenetic mechanisms, the better understanding of clonal selection in tumorigenesis, health impacts on environmental changes, or the evolution of medical practices.

We wish to demonstrate in this workshop that an ecological and evolutionary thinking can help to bring closer public and personalised health, curative and long-term population approaches of preventive medicines.

We have chosen four themes to address the different aspects of this brainstorming, by integrating current state-of-the-art on human, animal and plant studies.

• The first theme concerns infectious diseases, an evident walkway between clinical medicine and evolutionary sciences.
• The second theme addresses aging processes and the multiple theories around them, to understand the origin of organism tissue decline.
• The third theme focuses on the evolutionary theories of cancer and the promise of a comparative oncology.
• The last theme addresses the medical practices that have altered our species and continue to do - starting with the example of obstetrical and perinatal practices.

These four round tables will be organised in parallel and shall address the following questions to identify/prepare novel joint projects:

1. What are the existing bridges between evolution, ecology and the medical domain of interest?
2. What are the federative and innovative projects that should be developed?
3. What are the similarities / joint expertise that would make these unifying projects a real regional specificity in the national and international landscapes?
4. What are the infrastructures (platforms, resources, equipment, …) that should be developed?
5. How to educate students in health biology to take ecology and evolution into account?

Chairman: Dominique Pontier
Experts: Hugo Aguilianu, Marc Artois, Edith Bonnelye, Chantal Diaz, Lucie Etienne, Maria-Halima Laaberki, Jean-François Lemaître, Jean-Yves Madec, Charles Manceau, Philippe Marianneau, Paul Martin, Luc Perino, Frédérique Ponce, Frédéric Thomas.

Wrokshop 2: “Microbiome, Health & Eukaryote Development”

During the last decade, the study of Microbiota and their impacts on the Environment and Health has become an emerging and promising field that gathers growing research teams, as stated by the occurrence of the term ‘Microbiota/Microbiome’ in publications keywords. Biologists are aware that nearly all ecosystems are colonized with a wide range of bacteria, archaebacteria, fungi and viruses; that plants, animals and protists have coevolved with diverse assemblage of microorganisms; and that these relationships are required for normal organism Health and Development.

Within the framework of the national tender relating to the Idex2 program, the Lyon & St-Etienne scientific community has launched a workshop day on May 172016 to conduct strategic transactions in the field of ‘Microbiome, Health & Eukaryote Development’. The objective is to unite regional teams operating on this field, to generate new capabilities and to increase their regional, national and international visibility. The ultimate goal is to reinforce regional competitiveness, to enhance team reactivity, and to raise new projects at the frontier of knowledge.

The workshop will gather people working on four main domains encompassing soil microbiology, plant-microbe interactions, and invertebrate/vertebrate symbiosis. To favor open and democratic discussions around questions of interest, we have chosen a bottom-up strategy that consists, through a ‘World Café’ methodology, to promote interactions, the recognition of differences of opinion, and an efficient and spontaneous brainstorming.

During this first (but not last) meeting, we ambition to debate on the four following aspects, taking into account three key representative disciplines that are Ecology, Evolution and Development:

•  Areas of expertise: who are we? current state of art!
• Identification of major scientific challenges
• Emerging projects at the frontier of knowledge as well as federative projects within and between domains and disciplines'
• Infrastructure: what do we need to reach efficiently our project objectives

While the committee is aware that our community should build up future projects with both academic and applied research perspectives, we have chosen to focus on academic projects at this first session, while keeping in mind that our research holds a great potential for socio-economic applications. In the same vein, to avoid any confusing overlaps with the projects dealing with pure infectiology, the committee has decided to consider pathogenic situations related to microbiota dysbiosis, but not to focus on virus and bacterial virulence mechanisms per se. 

Chairman: Abdelaziz Heddi
Experts: François Leulier, Dominique Loqué, Pascal Simonet, Andrea Tamellini, Claire Valiente Moro, Fabrice Roux