The Entangled Fates of Viruses and Their Microbial Hosts

Joshua Weitz

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

jsweitz@gatech.edu

Viruses infect and lyse microbes leading to the release of new virus particles back into the environment. These lytic events scale-up to influence microbial population dynamics, community structure, and even ecosystem functioning. Yet, viruses do more than kill their microbial hosts; they can infect, integrate, and persist with microbes from one generation of cells to the next. In this talk, Prof. Weitz will revisit paradigms of virus-microbe dynamics by focusing on the duality of viruses as both predators and parasites, explaining how theory, experiments, and environmental sequence analysis can shed light on the ecology and evolution of viral strategies across a continuum from lysis to latency.

Prof. Joshua S. Weitz is the Patton Distinguished Professor of Biological Sciences and the Founding Director of the Quantitative Biosciences Graduate Program at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Weitz is a Simons Foundation Investigator in Ocean Processes and Ecology, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. Weitz will be in residence in the 2021-2022 academic year as a Blaise Pascal Chaire at the Institute of Biology at the ENS.

Recent publications:

1.       Weitz, J.S., Li, G., #Gulbudak, H., Cortez, M.H., and Whitaker, R.J. (2019) Viral invasion fitness across a continuum from lysis to latency. Virus Evolution. 5: vez006

2.       Weitz, J.S., Beckett, S.J., Brum, J.R., Cael, B.B., and Dushoff, J. (2017) Lysis, lysogeny, and virus-microbe ratios. Nature. 549: E1-E3.

3.       Weitz, JS. (2015) Quantitative Viral Ecology: Dynamics of Viruses and Their Microbial Hosts. Princeton University Press, 360 pp.