title: Understanding pathogens in the era of next generation sequencing.
abstract: What is a pathogen? Medical textbooks usually define a pathogen as any microorganism that causes disease. However, this widespread definition is problematic on a number of counts [1, 11]. Moreover, a generally accepted definition is not forthcoming among medical microbiologists, immunologists, and physicians. Here it is argued that there is another, and more pressing question to be asked, namely: what makes some organisms pathogenic and others not? Asking these questions instead allows for distinguishing pathogens from non-pathogens in a more flexible way, while at the same time emphasizing the roles of ecological and evolutionary processes in determining pathogenicity in infectious diseases.
authors.affiliation: Institute for the History of Medicine and Health, University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland. po35@hotmail.com
authors.forename: Pierre-Olivier
authors.initials: PO
authors.lastname: Méthot
mesh_terms: D058448:Biota; D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000382:microbiology*; D059014:High-Throughput Nucleotide Sequencing / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D054892:Metagenome