Research

Evaluating Impact of Algal-Virus Interactions on Ocean Ecosystems

How abundant are the major lineages of viruses? What are their distribution patterns? How frequently do they kill microbes? We use single-cell and single-virus molecular approaches, called the polony method, to quantify the abundances of viruses and the extent to which they infect the photosynthetic microbes that power our oceans in order to evaluate the effect that these microscale interactiosn have on global-scale processes.

Characterizing Features that Define the Success of Viruses in a Changing Ocean

Microbial eukaryotes are infected by viruses that have either single stranded DNA or RNA genomes that encode as few as 2 and no more than 12 genes. Such a small genomic repertoire suggests these viruses have limited capability to adapt to the variability in oceanic conditions. This might imply that their ecological dynamics are governed even more by stochastic interactions compared to more genomically complex viruses. Yet research in the Carlson Lab has shown clear patterns in the distributions of ssDNA and ssRNA viruses, indicating distinct lifestyle traits that are not yet fully understoond. The small genomes of these viruses provide an untapped opportunity to evaluate how virus lifestyles are shaped by the handful of the most essential genes to virus biology. To explore this we are isolating new viruses and algae to assess their genomic potential and examining the genomes of viruses in the wild as well.

Charting and Predicting the Viral Load of Picocyanobacterial Populations in the Oceans

Viruses play crucial roles in regulating ocean ecosystems by infecting and lysing microbial hosts and are thereby thought to drive significant transformations of carbon and other elements. Despite such roles, their large-scale impact on ecosystem dynamics and biogeochemical cycles remains poorly understood because infection measurements have yet to capture ecosystem-relevant spatial and temporal scales. We are using computational and modeling approaches to map viral infection across the oceans to generate ecosystem-level estimates of the impact of viruses for marine picocyanobacteria, earth's most abundant photosynthetic organism.

Carlson lab research is made possible by funding from:

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