One Health Institute

About the institute
The Institute's mission is to promote the principle mentioned in its name at the University and beyond, to integrate it into the teaching of the various courses, and to carry out active research in the areas associated with One Health. The fundamentals of the apporach have long been known, such as the fact that many pathogens can infect species other than humans and that pathogens can pass from animals to humans. Animal pathogens may become transmissible to humans and thus novel pathogens may emerge, such as the human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS and originates from monkeys, influenza viruses, which are originally viruses of waterfowl, or the well-known SARS-CoV2, which could have been transmitted from bats to humans via intermediate hosts. Other pathogens occur in the environment and enter the human body from there, such as the cholera pathogen Vibrio cholerae.

These findings led to the One Health approach of the World Health Organization (WHO), which states that human health cannot be separated from the health of animals and the environment, but that they form a single system in terms of the spread and development of pathogens and non-living agents. Accordingly, the control of various infectious or non-living agents that threaten health, the prevention of their effects and the treatment of the diseases they cause require a holistic, multidisciplinary approach and can only be effective if health sciences, veterinary sciences and environmental sciences are integrated into a single system. Taking the principle further and recognizing that humans live as part of an ecosystem, one can speak of ecosystem health or even planetary health by integrating planetary impacts, such as climate change.

Our institute is currently conducting two major research projects. We are investigating the prevalence of pathogens in wild, farm and domestic animals as well as in the environment according to the One Health apporach and are looking for epidemiological links with pathogens of human infections, mainly using the tools of genomic epidemiology. The second research task is closely related to this, as the huge amounts of data generated by second and third generation sequencing techniques in genomic epidemiological studies can now only be processed using genomic bioinformatic tools. Accordingly, the Institute is committed to the development of such tools and carry out related research. Through close collaboration between researchers working in the laboratory and in bioinformatics, we aim to optimize the processing of genomic data to ensure the quality of research results and to set new goals that are also in line with international research trends.
The most important goal of the One Health Institute is to introduce this approach into teaching, to familiarize students and all interested parties with the One Health principle and to contribute to the development of bioinformatics education in Hungary. Another important goal is to promote One Health research and genomic bioinformatics at our University and in Hungary by providing research services in this field.

More information about One Health and related topics can be found on the following pages:
    • https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/one-health
    • https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/One-Health-pre…
    • https://www.cdc.gov/onehealth/index.html
    • https://www.woah.org/en/what-we-do/global-initiatives/one-health/
    • https://www.fao.org/one-health/en
    • https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/43354/9241563095.pdf
    • https://www.planetaryhealthalliance.org/planetary-health

 

Contact information

The list of members with contact information of the One Health Institute can be viewed at this hyperlink

Research

One Health Research Group
The research group focuses on the emergence and spread of pathogens between the human, animal and environmental compartments utilising the One Health approach. Our primary research task is to identify and monitor the occurrence of multidrug-resistant bacteria in wild and domestic animals and their association with human disease. To understand this, we use methods from classical microbiology, genomic epidemiology and pharmacoepidemiology. We will investigate the biology of arthropod vectors involved in disease transmission using genomic analyses.

Bioinformatics Research Group
Our aim is to analyze biological data such as DNA, RNA and amino acid sequences using modern computational methods and to make the individual analyses more efficient. The group works closely with the researchers in the Institute's molecular laboratory. An essential part of the tasks consists of carrying out genomic bioinformatic and statistical analyses with second and third-generation sequencing data sets and evaluating the results. The team members have experience in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomics and transcriptomics.

PlantDromics Research Group
The group investigates bio-stimulants relevant for sustainable plant protection in economically important crops. Our main focus is on the transcriptomic analysis of plant metabolic pathways, with particular emphasis on defense mechanisms and interactions between plants and pathogens. Our work includes the analysis of biological samples from treated plants using next-generation sequencing techniques. Bioinformatic processing includes gene expression profiling and pathway analysis relying on multiple databases (e.g. KEGG, Reactome, Plant reactome). In field trials with specific materials, we carry out vitality and health assessments using drone technology with the help of our cooperation partners, and the images generated during remote sensing are processed and analyzed using IT methods for image processing.

Collaborations

  • University of Veterinary Medicine, Budapest
  • Ceva-Phylaxie Zrt
  • HUN-REN Veterinary Research Institute
  • HUN-REN Center for Ecological Research
  • HUN-REN-DE Conservation Biology Research Group
  • Hungarian University of Agriculture and Life Sciences
  • MTA-DE Research Group "Lendület" Cell Metabolism
  • National Center for Public Health and Pharmacy
  • Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology, University of Pécs

Educational activities

  • Elective courses
    • Antimicrobial chemotherapy
    • Vaccines
    • Bioinformatics in practice I.: introduction to processing WGS data
    • Application of modern bioinformatics methods in microbiology and metagenomics research
    • Bioinformatics in practice II: advances in processing WGS data
    • Analysis and visualisation of biological data
  • Optional courses
    • Problem solving in molecular biology: a simulation practice 
Last update: 2024. 02. 19. 10:14