Louis L'Hôte

I am a PhD student in ancient pathogen genetics in the School of Agriculture and Food Science at University College Dublin. I am currently Kevin Daly’s PhD student and part of the SFI Pathways project “Herd Health”.

Livestock animals were domesticated 10,000 years ago in southwest Asia, but little is known about their health — inbreeding, infectious disease — despite their central role in early farming societies. Recent advances in next-generation sequencing have made it possible to reconstruct ancient human pathogen genomes (e.g. Yersinia pestis, the agent of the Black Death) from archaeological specimens, but equivalent work on livestock pathogens remains rare.

My work focuses on recovering pathogen and animal DNA from 10,000-year-old sheep and goat remains from the Zagros Mountains in Iran, to understand how zoonotic pathogen evolution was shaped by the onset of domestication. I’m interested in everything to do with microbes — from ancient DNA to wet lab.

After an undergraduate degree in life sciences, I pursued a Master’s in Engineering in Microbiology at the Faculté des sciences et technologies, Université de Lorraine.

During my master’s I joined two research projects: in 2021 I worked on ancient woolly mammoth microbiota at the Microbial Palaeogenomics Unit at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, gaining extensive experience in metagenomics and ancient DNA. In 2022 I completed my master’s thesis in Copenhagen at the Centre for ExoLife Sciences (CELS), using metagenomics and metatranscriptomics to understand how microbes survive in Mars-like extreme environments.