The Helmholtz Institute for One Health: A new approach to researching changing human-animal relationships

The One Health concept and the approach of the Helmholtz Institute for One Health (HIOH) to establish "One Health Exploratories" in both sub-Saharan Africa and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will be presented in the lecture. As part of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research (HZI), understanding the development of infectious diseases is considered a key component of the work. Examples will be presented that show how research on pathogens benefits from the application of the One Health approach. These include the study of great apes, the closest living relatives of humans, which serve as "sentinels" for infectious diseases circulating in ecosystems that may be of relevance to human health. In addition, some of the technologies developed by HIOH to improve genomic surveillance will be presented. It will explain how the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) and invertebrate DNA can be used to monitor biodiversity and study the ecology of infectious diseases.

Since 2023, Dr. Jan Gogarten has headed the Evolutionary Community Ecology research group at the Helmholtz Institute for One Health, Greifswald. He works in two biodiversity hotspots in Uganda and the Ivory Coast and on a wide range of topics in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology as well as microbiology and virology.

Moderation and commentary: Professor Dr. Mathias Grote