In my seminar last year, I described how bacteriophage lambda measures the number of coinfecting viruses and uses this value to assess the abundance of potential hosts and decide whether to become dormant. I will present several recent updates to this work: (i) We found that co-infecting viruses impede each other's entry into the host cell. Consequently, the intracellular viral number does not accurately reflect that ratio of phages to bacteria in the environment. (ii) Once inside the host, phage genomes and regulatory proteins exhibit surprising spatial organization, which may allow individual viruses to maintain independent decision making capacity. Time permitting, I will also describe a simple high-thruput method we recently developed for counting phages and bacteria. Throughout, I will highlight collaborations, both ongoing and planned.
