LA (Laurens) Peer

Bacteriophages (viruses of bacteria) play an integral role in formation, development, and functioning of microbiomes. In soils microbes are responsible for nutrient cycling, carbon-capture, and (protection against) pathogenesis of plants. The physical, chemical, and biological heterogeneity of soils greatly limits the spread of the non-motile phages through these environments. However, similarly to marine systems, phages are still 10 times more abundant that bacteria in soils, with up to a billion phages present per gram. This suggests that phages are just as prevalent in soils as they are in other environments, and that our current understanding of phage ecology does not capture the mechanisms behind our observations in the real world.

Recently bacterivore (bacteria-feeding) nematodes were found to be able to spread phages through the soil. This phenomenon (described as "hitchhiking") could aid phages in finding new host bacteria and therefore explain their abundance in soils. Although this hitchhiking has been demonstrated in the lab, its prevalence in nature and underlying molecular mechanisms remain largely unknown. This project aims to explore the interactions between bacteriophages and nematodes in order to deepen our understanding of the complex networks in the soil microbiome.