Microbes are essential to human health and the maintenance of planetary-scale biogeochemical cycles. Yet, microbes get sick too. There are an estimated 10³⁰ viruses on Earth, the vast majority of which infect microbes. Ecologically relevant viral infections of microbes have long been thought to culminate in the death of the infected microbial cell via lysis and the release of new virus particles. However, recent discoveries show that virus genomes are incorporated into nearly every microbial genome, fundamentally altering host cell physiology and behavior. These long-term, i.e., ‘persistent’, viral infections may help cells grow, defend cells against (deadly) lytic infections by other viruses, or act as weapons against competitors – raising new questions on the rules of viral life. Ongoing work aims to understand virus-host interactions across a continuum from lysis to latency, including:

• Cell-centric measures of viral fitness
• Coevolutionary dynamics of viruses and bacteria
• Linking individual infection outcomes to population and ecosystem dynamics.

Recent Publications

• Emergence and maintenance of stable coexistence during a long-term multicellular evolution experiment
• Design, optimization, and inference of multiphasic decay of infectious virus particles
• Inferring strain-level mutational drivers of phage-bacteria interaction phenotypes

Team Members