Jay Lennon
Indiana University, IN·Microbiology & Immunology
When growth conditions turn bad, many microbes go dormant, entering a reversible state of very low metabolic activity. Dormancy has long been seen as a way to survive starvation, extreme temperatures or antimicrobial drugs, but it also changes how microbes interact with the viruses that infect them.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Ecology & Evolution
Biology
- Topics
microbial dormancy
sporulation
bacterial spores
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2030
What they work on
- Test competing models of how phage genomes become entrapped in Bacillus subtilis spores, using CRISPR editing of viral auxiliary sporulation genes and single-cell assays to assess suppression of the lytic cycle and chromosome segregation.
- Determine how entrapment changes spore development by profiling host and virus gene expression with single-cell transcriptomics and analyzing cell morphology with AI-informed methods.
- Track the fate of infected spores, or "virospores," in a microfluidic platform to quantify entrapment dynamics and its fitness consequences for both bacterium and phage.
- Integrate experimental data with mechanistic models to explain how viruses and hosts make infection and dormancy decisions in fluctuating, uncertain environments.
More about the research
Dormancy can shield a cell from infection, yet some viruses have evolved ways around this defense, which raises the question of how these two strategies coevolve.
Why it matters
Dormant microbial stages make infections hard to clear, since both spores and quiescent cells can evade treatment. Clarifying how viral genomes hide inside spores and reawaken could inform phage therapy, which uses viruses to kill bacteria, for chronic infections caused by spore-forming bacteria and other microbes with quiescent life stages, and it extends basic theory about host–pathogen coevolution.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
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.
Elizabeth Libby
Northeastern University, MA·Microbiology & Immunology
Quantitatively dissect how conserved Hanks-type serine/threonine kinase–phosphatase systems in Bacillus subtilis are wired, and how that architecture generates rare single cells with extreme phenotypes such as antibiotic resistance.
Seunghyun Sim
University of California-Irvine, CA·Chemistry·Early-career
Build a high-throughput screen for enzyme activity using fluorescence-activated cell sorting, an instrument that sorts single particles by brightness, together with engineered chemical probes that fluoresce only when the displayed enzyme turns over its substrate.
The school
Indiana University: 21 labs on PI Pages, $897M a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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