WeitzGroup@GeorgiaTech

Host-phage interactions provide a tractable model system for linking data and theory at multiple scales and could help in developing a new theoretical foundation for microbial ecology. This relatively simple system could prove to be a benchmark for microbiologists who are probing more complex cellular and ecosystem processes with increasingly finer resolution, producing an expanding surplus of data through a varied means of powerful experimental techniques. Recently, applications of mathematical concepts to microbiology have found successes in efforts to organize and reduce the complexity of high-throughput data. Of course, relying on quantitative methods to parse data cannot replace the hard thinking and additional theoretical tools needed to uncover meaningful biological insights.