Microbial Population Biology

On 4/24 and today I showed slides describing some of the body of theory on the evolution of virulence. These slides are here: http://micropopbio.org/files/2007/12/713-lecture-9-evol-of-virulence.ppt

I also presented results from my old paper with Paul Ewald:

http://micropopbio.org/cooper/files/2007/11/cooper-et-al-2002-proc-r-soc.pdf

You all presented very interesting papers as riffs on the theme of why virulence might evolve. Please post these articles on your blog and provide a very brief summary. It’s up to the rest of us to read one or more of these articles and comment on them.

For Thursday, I will introduce how we might do experiments to understand how communities are structured. Thus, we will come full circle to community ecology, now that we’ve spent several weeks understanding how microbial species might interact at a small scale. Two articles relevant to these questions are:

http://micropopbio.org/cooper/files/2007/11/gordon-zebrafish-mouse-transplant.pdf
http://micropopbio.org/cooper/files/2007/11/gordon-zebrafish-mouse-supp-methods.pdf

Also: http://collections.plos.org/plosbiology/gos-2007.php

Also see this recent meta-metagenomic study: www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/nature06810