TEAM

christiane riedel (ENS de LYon, full professor, dr.med.vet.)

Bio

Christiane Riedel (ORCID: 0000-0002-4349-996X) is an expert in molecular virology and structural biology and has significant expertise in virus diagnostics and virus discovery. After earning her veterinary degree (in the first 2%) at the Justus-Liebig University, Giessen, she received her doctorate degree in molecular virology (“summa cum laude”) in 2011 at the same university. After a postdoc at the renowned University of Oxford, where she worked on retrovirus structure using cryo electron microscopy, she accepted a staff scientist position at the Institute of Virology at the Vetmeduni Vienna, Austria, in 2015. In 2022, she was recruited as full professor at the ENSL, where she is heading her research team StruVir with a focus on the structural biology of arteri- and pestiviruses and the virus-host interactions of pestiviruses. Additionally, she is teaching at the ENSL, supervising pre- and postgraduate students, setting up the CryoEM platform at the ENSL and actively involved in the scientific community through the organisation of workshops and editorial duties. 

reserach interests

Since my studies I am fascinated by the ability of viruses, with often very limited coding potential, to replicate and manipulate their hosts and to potentially cause significant damage to a multicellular, highly sophisticated organism. My key interest are viruses that infect livestock species and wildlife, with the aim to understand how these viruses interact with the host cell, both at the molecular and (ultra-) stuctural level. These questions keep on fascinating me and also keep me busy. If you would like to know more about our research or internship / thesis / employment opportunities, please don't hesitate to get in touch :-) 

christiane.riedel[at]ens-lyon.fr

CHristophe combet (CNRS, CR)

BIO   

After beginning university studies in biochemistry, Christophe Combet (ORCID: 0000-0002-7348-3520, PubMed, Scholar) turned to bioinformatics. He obtained his PhD in this discipline 2001 from the University of Paris 7 under the supervision of Pr. Gilbert Deléage. Then, he worked one year as a post-doctoral fellow with Dr Nicola Guex and Dr Torsten Schwede at GlaxoSmithKline in Geneva. In 2002, the French National Research Center (CNRS) hired him as a research associate in Lyon. In the last three decades, his research topics were: protein bioinformatics (sequence, 3-D structure, protein-protein interaction and function) and biological databases, applied mainly to viral pathogens. Among his achievements broadly used by the scientific community are the NPS@ web server for sequence analysis, Geno3D for automatic comparative modelling of protein three-dimensional (3-D) structure, and several biological databases. In 2014, he joined the team of Pr. Fabien Zoulim in order to extend sequence-structure-function databases for Hepatitis B and C viruses. In 2025, he joined the team of Pr. Christiane Riedel at the ENS de Lyon to work on integrative structural biology of multiple animal viruses by combining cryo-electron microscopy and state-of-the-art 3-D structure prediction algorithms.