Marcia Marston
Roger Williams University, RI·Microbiology & Immunology
Viruses that infect ocean microbes shape how nutrients move through the sea and which microbes thrive. Yet scientists still know little about which viruses can infect which bacteria, and how these matchups change over seasons and years.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
marine microbiology
cyanophage
bacteriophage
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Isolate about 100 Synechococcus cyanobacteria and 200 cyanophages from Narragansett Bay and test cross-infection to ask at what level of genetic relatedness infection networks shift from nested to modular.
- Use comparative genomics of Synechococcus and cyanophage isolates to identify genetic loci that determine viral host range and host susceptibility.
- Track Synechococcus and cyanophage community dynamics with amplicon sequencing of variable genes across ten years of monthly archived samples and a new two-year weekly time series.
More about the research
This project studies that question in a natural community in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island.
Why it matters
This basic research shows how viral infection shapes the diversity of ocean phytoplankton and bacteria, and how viruses and hosts can coexist stably in a coastal ecosystem. This understanding could eventually inform models of how viruses affect nutrient cycling and microbial communities in the oceans.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Brook Nunn
University of Washington, WA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether daily (diel) metabolic schedules of chemical exchange among plankton persist in a dynamic coastal ecosystem, using diel time-series samples taken before, during and after blooms near Orcas Island, Washington.
Paul Kirchberger
Oklahoma State University, OK·Microbiology & Immunology
Compare the mechanisms of superinfection exclusion, by which a resident prophage blocks other viruses, across independently evolved microvirus prophages, a putative defense system and lytic microviruses that may have supplied its evolutionary precursors.
Sheri Floge
Wake Forest University, NC·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how much vitamin B1 and related vitamers are released by B1-producing picocyanobacteria and heterotrophic bacteria grown in pure cultures.
The school
Roger Williams University: 1 labs on PI Pages, $4M a year on research.
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