Jacopo Marchi is the lead author of a new publication in Science Advances as part of a collaborative effort with the University of Maryland – College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences & the University of Exeter. Dr. Marchi and collaborators show (via theory, models, and experiments) how phage can robustly propagate as bacterial populations migrate. This research was inspired by the question: what would happen if a chemotactic bacterial population started to migrate, using up resources and propagating forward, until it came into contact with a local region of microbe-killing phage? 

Stable coexistence and transport of lytic phage infections with migrating bacterial hosts is one component of the body of work in the Weitz Group which investigates how conventional assumptions about phage-bacteria interactions are modified in different environments.