ABR: Population Dynamics and Life History of Symbionts

这项研究的重点是生活在亲密关系中的不同种类的生物。寄生描述了一种最常见的模式，即一个较小的生物体生活在一个较大的生物体上或体内——较小的寄生虫对较大的宿主造成一些伤害。寄生只是一系列联系的一端。在许多情况下，较大的宿主需要较小的、有益的伙伴，如细菌，以消化特殊类型的食物或提供必需的营养。这项理论研究综合了生物共同生活的各种方式，确定了这些联系如何产生和进化的未解之谜，并提出了根据生态和进化原则解释这些谜题的模型。数学和计算机模型的发展方式，可以设计新的实验室和实地研究，以测试这些想法，并进一步了解寄生和有益关联的生物学。这项工作有助于理解为什么寄生虫对宿主造成的伤害程度各不相同。此外，这项研究为理解微生物之间的相互作用提供了一个广泛的概念框架，例如生活在宿主体内的病毒或细菌种群。

This research focuses on different kinds of organisms that live in intimate association. Parasitism describes the most familiar pattern, in which a smaller organism lives on or inside a larger organism--the smaller parasite causing some harm to the larger host. Parasitism is just one end of a continuum of associations. In many cases, the larger host requires smaller, beneficial partners such as bacteria in order to digest special types of food or to provide essential nutrients. This theoretical research synthesizes the diverse ways in which organisms live together, identifies unanswered puzzles about how such associations arise and evolve, and proposes models to explain these puzzles in terms of ecological and evolutionary principles. The mathematical and computer models are developed in a way that new laboratory and field studies can be designed to test the ideas and gain further insight into the biology of both parasitic and beneficial associations. This work contributes to understanding why parasites vary in the amount of harm they cause to their hosts. In addition, this research provides a broad conceptual framework for understanding interactions between microbes, such as populations of viruses or bacteria living within a host.