Benoit Paix

Through an interdisciplinary approach, my research is focused on holobiont (host + microbiome) interactions, to understand the role of microbiomes associated with aquatic organisms and the impact of anthropogenic disturbances.

I address this research through three main questions:

• How do hosts select and maintain a specific microbiome through the production of chemical defences?
• How does this microbiota influence the host life cycle, particularly growth?
• How environmental factors disrupt these interactions.

To answer these questions, I employ multidisciplinary approaches combining metabarcoding, and metabolomics, since my PhD, and more recently additional “omics” techniques such as metagenomics.

As a research scientist at the IRD (French Research Institute for Development), I am currently studying the epiphytic microbiota of holopelagic Sargassum to elucidate its role in the proliferation and degradation processes of these algae.