TITLE:

The Symbiosis of Viruses and Bacteria Explains the Ecology and Evolution of Microbial Communities

DATE:

Friday, November 2nd, 2018

TIME:

3:30 PM

LOCATION:

GMCS-301

SPEAKER:

Antonio Luque, Assistant Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics.

ABSTRACT:

Phages are viruses that infect bacteria and are the most abundant biological
entity on Earth, playing major ecological roles in the environment. Understanding
the dynamics of phages and bacteria in ecosystems would help shape microbial
communities, facilitating restoration efforts as well as developing effective
strategies for personalized medicine. The characterization of phages and bacterial
communities, however, remains a challenge. Here we hypothesize that phage-bacteria
symbionts called lysogens are not subject to the canonical trade-off between
competition and resistance, conferring them a dominant role in shaping the ecology
and evolution of ecosystems. This hypothesis was tested by developing a mathematical
model that combined lytic and lysogenic viral-bacterial communities as well as an
evolutionary model that estimated the accumulation of integrated phages per bacteria.
The model recovered viral and bacterial abundances observed across eleven ecosystems,
and predicted the trend in bacterial richness as well as the distribution of prophages
per bacteria. The mechanisms studied here about lysogeny and its prevalence reconciles
two conflicting paradigms in viral ecology and provides a new framework to model
phage-bacteria communities.

HOST:

Dr. Jose Castillo

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