Igor Mokrousov, PhD, DSc
Head of Laboratory of Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics
Igor Mokrousov (born 01/05/1967), PhD, DSc, is the Head of Laboratory of Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics at St. Petersburg Pasteur Institute, Russia. His research interests include study of evolution, phylogenomics, and molecular epidemiology of tuberculosis; phylogeography of Mycobacterium tuberculosis and co-evolution with humans; molecular mechanisms and genotypic detection of drug resistance. His current projects focus on the application of next-generation sequencing for genome-wide analysis to understand the pathogenetic characteristics and evolutionary trajectory of various M. tuberculosis lineages and emerging clones.
Dr. Mokrousov co-authored 9 patents and 190 articles in Pubmed/Web of Science journals (H-index=36; 4944 citations in WoS core collection)), including papers in Clinical Microbiology Reviews, Lancet Infectious Diseases, Nature Genetics, and chapters in books by Cambridge University Press, Springer, Oxford University Press.
Since 1993, he works in St. Petersburg Pasteur Institute. At the same time, on several occasions, he visited as a guest scientist/invited professor: Beijing Children’s Hospital (China), Institute of Microbiology (Bulgaria), University of Toulouse (France), Institute Pasteur of Guadeloupe (France). Since 2018, he is a member of the Steering Committee of the European Society of Mycobacteriology. He is serving as Editor for a number of international journals (Senior Board Member for BMC Microbiology, Editor for Infection, Genetics and Evolution and Academic Editor for PLoS One). He received Scientific Prize from International Union Against Tuberculosis and Lung Diseases (2004), Marie Curie fellowship (2007), and several Honor Awards from the Russian Health Service. His research was supported by grants from the Russian Science Foundation, Russian Foundation for Basic Research, NATO Science Program, European Commission, French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, National Natural Science Foundation of China.
Dr Mokrousov made a recognized contribution to the study of human-M. tuberculosis coevolution and put forward a hypothesis that evolutionary histories of H. sapiens and human pathogens are comirrored and coshaped. He proposed a new simple measure of genetic distance between geographic populations within a microbial species based on the observed difference in the frequencies of its genotypes. The particular feature regarding current dissemination of tuberculosis is that ordinary human exchange per se is not enough to expose and introduce new strains into an indigenous population, even in the present time of urbanization and overcrowding. It appears that there is a kind of human resistance developed in the local population through its co-existence with historically established clones, acting against newly imported clones. His contribution to evolutionary studies of M. tuberculosis was a development of concept of large-scale phylogenetic sublineages within major genotypes in this species, marked with different evolutionary trajectories and drug resistance capacities. His more recent studies focused on pathogenomic features of the emerging, potentially pandemic clones of Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5924-0576
Web of Science Researcher ID: J-3640-2014
Scopus 7003916739
Complete of publications in Pubmed: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=mokrousov+i+OR+mokrousov+iv+NOT+mokrousov+is
The complete CV: see PDF file