Viral infections of marine microbes can transform the fate of microbial populations that fuel global ocean biogeochemical cycles. For example, viral infections of microbes lead to the release of carbon and nutrients back into the environment. This regeneration of carbon and nutrients stimulates the activity of other microbes and diverts carbon and nutrients from larger organisms in marine food webs. Because virus-microbe infections are relatively specific, it is critical to identify those pairs of viruses and microbes that may disproportionately contribute to the turnover of carbon and nutrients in the ocean. This project will develop quantitative approaches and tools to quantify which viruses infect which microbes and to use these data to quantify how viral infections of microbes collectively shape nutrient and carbon cycles in the North Atlantic Ocean. The project will analyze virus-microbe interactions in mesocosms at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in mid-coast Maine and during open ocean expeditions to the Bermuda Atlantic Time-Series Study (BATS) site. An interdisciplinary team will leverage recent advances in molecular biology, computational biology, and mathematical modeling to identify virus-host partners and their impact on the movement of elements through marine systems. This project will support three graduate students, six undergraduate students and one postdoctoral researcher in an interdisciplinary context. Research advances will be translated into reproducible software methods to be disseminated via the community cyberinfrastructure platform iVirus, with additional training materials presented as part of a viral method and informatics workshop held at The Ohio State University. The translation of discoveries to the public will be furthered by the involvement of journalism undergraduate students at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville.
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