My phage talk at North Carolina State University

Just got back from North Carolina State University last week. Eric Miller invited me out for a lecture in his Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. Eric has been involved with various bacteriophage projects over the years, including most recently the HHMI phage genome sequencing project and phages that might be useful for killing bee pathogens. I was really impressed with NCSU and how linked in they are with the various industries of Research Triangle. Nearly every person I spoke to had a collaborative, educational, or financial relationship of some kind with them. I don't often see this kind of collaboration between industry and academia, and it is clearly a model for other universities to follow. As a side note, NCSU just launched a major initiative on hiring new faculty in the area of non-human microbiomes.

Anyway, I presented our long-term studies and recent @srbordenstein work on Wolbachia's phage WO, which has some very interesting features that are unique to the viral world. This work is currently in review. I also covered work by @JMetcalfVU and @DNADiva87 on bioprospecting Archaea for new antibiotics that originally stemmed from our investigations of phage WO (link to paper). Here's the talk that I recorded in Keynote, exported to Quicktime, and posted to YouTube. Comments and questions are most welcome.