Seminar: Matthew Sullivan

Microbiome engineering: How genome-resolved data and AI-powered toolkits are bringing community context, including viruses, to best manage microbiomes and their products 

Microbes drive energy and nutrient cycling that fuels the Earth, and viruses modulate these microbial impacts via killing, reprogramming and gene transfer. As environmental virology studies the global virosphere (the diversity of viruses in nature), we face challenges to organize this ‘sequence space’ (create a sequence-based viral taxonomy), link viruses to their hosts (who infects whom), and establish how virus populations are structured (ecological drivers) and alter ecosystems (their impacts). Here I will review how we study viruses in nature, new biology being revealed, and how that will help fight climate change and, because the methods are generalizable to other ecosystems like mammals, spur a new generation of medical treatments.