Conference: The Social Lives of Viruses Meeting

这一奖项将资助2024年6月在波多黎各圣胡安的Verdanza酒店举行的为期两天的会议，会议的重点将是病毒式社交。病毒通常被认为是孤立的实体，实际上具有高度的社会性。进化合作是许多病毒成功的关键，是基因组复制和病毒粒子构建等关键特征的基础。与此同时，在病毒方面的合作经常破裂，几乎所有已知病毒中都存在利用病毒欺骗的从头进化，推动病毒种群动态、进化和致病性。病毒的社会相互作用可以影响病毒生命周期的每个阶段，发生在整个病毒圈，并对社会性的进化提出新的问题，具有跨进化生物学的广泛影响。最近的发现、新的方法和日益增长的跨学科兴趣相结合，意味着利用病毒的社会生活的时机已经成熟。然而，这一领域的可能性目前正受到阻碍，因为进化生物学家往往没有意识到病毒中社会特征的多样性、重要性，甚至是存在，而病毒学家很少利用将病毒中的社会特征与其他生物学领域联系起来的进化理论和概念。会议将针对病毒学家和进化生物学家合成最有用的关键主题：病毒作弊；整个病毒圈的社会性；病毒的社会进化理论；新的模型系统；病毒的交流与合作。会议的主要目标将是促进新的跨学科合作，以推动在新兴的社会病毒学领域取得进展。还将有两个额外的目标：(1)发表一篇关于社会病毒学的观点文章，突出会议期间在概念上取得的进展；(2)以一种可以广泛传播给公众的形式，如播客、YouTube视频或印刷媒体出版物，提供关于会议和整个社会病毒学的信息。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This award will fund a two-day conference at the Verdanza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in June 2024 that will focus on viral social interactions. Viruses, often thought of as solitary entities, are in fact highly social. Evolutionary cooperation is key to the success of many viruses, underlying key traits such as genome replication and the construction of virions. At the same time, cooperation often breaks down in viruses, with exploitative viral cheats evolving de novo in almost all known viruses, driving viral population dynamics, evolution, and pathogenicity. Viral social interactions can affect every stage of the viral lifecycle, occur across the virosphere, and raise new questions for the evolution of sociality with broad implications across evolutionary biology. The combination of recent discoveries, new methods, and growing interdisciplinary interest, means that the time is ripe to exploit the social lives of viruses. However, the possibilities of this field are currently being held back, because evolutionary biologists are often unaware of the diversity, importance, or even existence, of social traits in viruses, while virologists only rarely make use of evolutionary theories and concepts that link social traits in viruses to other areas of biology.The conference will target key topics for which synthesis between virologists and evolutionarybiologists is most useful: cheating in viruses; sociality across the virosphere; social evolution theory for viruses; new model systems; viral communication and cooperation. The principal objective of the meeting will be to foster new interdisciplinary collaborations to drive progress within the emerging field of sociovirology. There will be two additional objectives: (1) publish a perspective piece on sociovirology highlighting conceptual advances made during the meeting; and (2) provide information about the meeting and sociovirology as a whole in a format that can be widely disseminated to the general public, such as a podcast, YouTube video, or publication in print media.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.