SEMINAR: OI Seminar Series - Dolors Vaque

Title: Role of virus in the Ocean

Abstract: During the last decades aquatic viruses have been recognized to be an important component of microbial food webs, with abundances of 10 milions per ml in surface waters they are considered the most abundant biological entities. The viruses present in the water column may infect fishes and mammals but its majority infect phytoplankton and bacterioplankton. The net effect of viruses in the pelagic food web, described as 'the viral shunt', consists of transforming the particulate organic matter of the host into more viruses, and returning biomass in the form of dissolved and colloidal organic matter that can be consumed by other bacteria and allowing the retention of nutrients in the euphotic zone. In addition viruses are mostly considered as killers, however they can insert part of their genome in the chromosome of the prokaryotic host or in the chloroplast, mitochondrial or nuclear genetic systems in the eukaryotic algae host.The inserted viral genome conforms the lysogenic temperate virus that is maintained silent, until an environmental factor triggers the temperate virus to become lytic (a process termed induction), which introduce changes in the virus infection lyfe-strategy and implicactions in the biogeochemical cycles in the Ocean.

Bio: Dolors Vaqué was born in Barcelona (1953). She got her PhD in Biological Sciences in 1989 by the University of Barcelona. Since 1991 she is a Senior Research Scientist at the Marine Science Institut (CSIC), and from 2010 she is the Editor in Chief of the International Journal Scientia Marina (IF: 1.278)

She is interested in aquatic microbial ecology including the role of viruses within the microbial food webs. In concrete she is studying the carbon fluxes between bacteria and protists and the effect of the viral shunt. How protists and viruses will control bacterial biomass, production and promote changes in bacterial diversity. She works in virus identification, isolation and virushost-range specificity of marine microorganisms. She has participated in 23 Oceanographic cruises (Mediterranean Sea, Atlantic Ocean, North Sea Antarctic Ocean and Arctic Ocean), on board of the R/V Garcia del Cid, BIO-Hesperides (Spain), Poseidon and Heincke (Germany), Amundsen (Canada). Total 580 days at Sea, and with a stage of 45 days in the Antarctic Base Juan Carlos I (Spanish Base) and 36 days in UNIS (Lonyerbean, Spitbergen, Svalbard). Dolors has published a total of 95 research papers of which 75 are in SCI journals (total citations: 1968, H-number: 27), and she has lead and participated in total in 35 national and international projects.