Investigating how viruses transform human health and the fate of our planet.
Investigating how viruses transform human health and the fate of our planet.
Investigating how viruses transform human health and the fate of our planet.
A new paper has been published in Nature Communications. Entitled “Disentangling top-down drivers of mortality underlying diel population dynamics of Prochlorococcus in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre,” the study provides insights into the lifecycle of photosynthetic microbes that drive the base of marine food webs. As shared by the University of Maryland’s Biology Department, “the findings […]
Dr. Luo is an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and head of the Microbial Ecology Lab. Dr. Luo’s research
Recent Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. graduate and former Weitz Group member Daniel Muratore is set to begin the Omidyar Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) this September. As an Omidyar Fellow, Murature will have the opportunity to complete an up to three-year residency at SFI, where they will “contribute to the Institute’s research, advance the […]
The group recently officially welcomed first-year Quantitative Biosciences Ph.D. student Siya Xie. Siya is excited to begin research focusing the factors influencing the stoichiometric characteristics of marine bacteria, such as the carbon to nitrogen ratio in genome and proteins. She is also investigating the genomic mutations affecting bacterial susceptibility to viral infection and designing a […]
Plants – even microscopic ones – come in all shapes and sizes. As important players in the Earth’s carbon cycle, marine researchers are particularly interested in what determines the size of phytoplankton, photosynthesizing microorganisms that live near the ocean’s surface. When these microscopic plant-like organisms sink to deeper ocean waters, they sequester the carbon they’ve […]
The open ocean is the world’s wettest desert, containing vanishingly small concentrations of nutrients. Yet phytoplankton, a type of water-dwelling microscopic plant, have adapted to grow and survive in this near barren environment. These microorganisms play a key role in the biological pump, an important process that drives the ocean’s carbon cycle and absorbs carbon […]
In 1977, scientists in St. Petersburg discovered a virus that was infecting cyanobacteria, a type of photosynthesizing bacteria, living in water on the outskirts of the city. The virus, cyanophage S-2L, had an adaptation that broke traditional rules of DNA construction and may open a whole new world of possibilities for synthetic biology. Generally, DNA […]
Daniel Muratore co-authored a new publication in ISMEJ. This study examined the day-night pigment budgeting of marine phytoplankton, identifying night as an important recovery phase to rebuild photoreactive pigments that are degraded by UV-radiation during the day.
Ashley Coenen presented at the annual NSF BioOceans conference (virtually, this year). BioOceans is a multi-institute collaboration which aims to characterize bacteria-phage infection networks in surface ocean communities. The presentation prompted discussion among microbiologists, virologists, and oceanographers about model design and the unknown biology regarding phage infection.
Dr. Stephen Beckett and Prof. Joshua Weitz contributed to a new study published in ISME J that measured the infected fraction of Prochlorococcus cells in the North Pacific ocean. The iPolony method suggests that less than 2% of Prochlorococcus cells in the surface ocean are infected at any time by T4- or T7-like viruses, which […]