Abstract

Bacteriophages are viruses which infect bacteria. A bacteriophage will begin its life cycle by injecting a single molecule of DNA into a host cell, before shutting down the host, taking control of the host’s resources, making copies itself, and bursting open the host cell – all in just 17 minutes. In this talk, I will give a brief introduction to bacteriophage biology, before explaining how we have experimentally measured the timing of some of these infection steps in our lab. We will then reflect on how the bacteriophage controls and coordinates these steps to produce a successful infection. Some considerations include the role of small copy number noise, and how the timing of bacteriophage genes expression is controlled despite the apparent scarcity of regulatory elements in the bacteriophage genome. Lastly, I will discuss how variability in infection outcomes across a population of bacteriophages may influence the fitness of the population as a whole.

The seminar will be held in LR5 , Baker Building, Department of Engineering, and online (zoom): https://newnham.zoom.us/j/92544958528?pwd=YS9PcGRnbXBOcStBdStNb3E0SHN1UT09