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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Viruses are ubiquitous in the environment, with densities often ten-fold higher than that of their microbial hosts. Viruses can function like microbial predators, regulating the amount and diversity of hosts present in a community. However, efforts to understand the dynamics of complex virus-microbe communities are still in their infancy. Here, I present examples of the interplay between evolutionary and ecological dynamics arising due to virus-microbe interactions. In the first example, I show how rapid changes in the frequency of bacterial strains that differ in their susceptibility to infection can imprint a novel ecological signature - so-called cryptic dynamics. Then, in a second example, I show how rapid changes in the frequencies of hosts and viruses that differ in their cross-infectivity can reverse the canonical predictions of Lotka-Volterra (and similar) dynamics, leading to dynamics in which it appears that hosts eat viruses. In both examples, I synthesize insights from theory and models with results from laboratory experiments. However, applying such insights to the environment requires addressing an ongoing challenge: how to characterize who infects whom when many ubiquitous microbes and associated viruses are not yet culturable. I close with a discussion of recent innovations that can help shed light on the interactions of viruses and microbes using culture-independent techniques.
