Research work · 2016
The Future of Quantitative Viral Ecology
Quantitative Viral Ecology
Abstract
This chapter presents a perspective on the types of developments, both technical and theoretical, that are forthcoming and the influence they are likely to have in shaping our view of the diversity and functions of environmental viruses. It focuses on theoretical challenges of two kinds: “forward” problems and “inverse” problems. It argues that for purely technological reasons, many measurements in viral ecology have not been comparable, in a quantitative sense. Moreover, there have been relatively few attempts to integrate what virus ecologists have measured into models of microbial communities. Whatever integration has occurred has focused almost exclusively on lab-based population and evolutionary dynamics. There is a pressing need to understand the ecological role of viruses of microbes, which requires an increasing number of theorists to investigate the interactions between microbes and the viruses that infect them.