Bruce Levin: An excursion into the population and evolutionary dynamics of bacteriophage
- Datum: 17.10.2019
- Uhrzeit: 11:00 - 12:00
- Vortragende(r): Bruce Levin von der Emory University, Atlanta, USA
- Mehr Informationen über den Vortragenden finden Sie hier: https://www.eclf.net/
- Ort: MPI Plön
- Raum: Hörsaal
- Gastgeber: Paul Rainey
Abstract (auf Englisch):
While the viruses of bacteria and
archaea, phage, are touted to be the most abundant organisms on earth,
we know very little about the population and evolutionary biology of
natural populations of these viruses and their contribution to the
ecology, evolution and species and strain composition of the natural
communities of their host bacteria and archaea. Fundamental questions
remain un- answered or insufficiently answered. Do phage limit the
densities of their host bacteria and archaea? How are these viruses
maintained after the almost invariable evolution of resistant or immune
bacteria upon which they cannot replicate? Under what conditions does
natural selection favor the evolution of temperate rather than purely
lytic modes of phage replication, lysogeny? Under what conditions will
natural selection favor bacteria-expressed genes, like those for the
production of the toxins responsible for the virulence of many
pathogenic bacteria, be carried on the prophage of temperate viruses
rather than plasmids or the chromosomes of bacteria? Why, if resistance
can be readily generated by mutation do bacteria have other sometimes
complex mechanisms, like restriction-modification (RM) and CRISPR-Cas,
to prevent them from succumbing to infections with lytic phage? Did RM
and CRISPR-Cas evolve and are they maintained by selection mediated by
lytic phage? In this talk, which I hope will be a discussion, I will
consider what mathematical and computer simulation models and laboratory
experiments with bacteria and phage tell us about the answers to these
questions.