Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences / February 6, 2013 /
As recently as 2010, Forest Rohwer could be found immersed—literally—in the Pacific Ocean. Rohwer, a microbiologist at San Diego State University, has spent more than a decade researching the bacteria and viruses that inhabit coral reefs, developing ways to study the microbes, and asking how they interact with each other. Now he’s diving into a new territory that is prime for exploration: the viruses that call the human body home. His move comes at a time when there is growing interest in studying the so-called human virome, and the methods that Rohwer helped develop and fine-tune for studying marine microbes are now being applied to the human ecosystem. After all, the human gut isn’t all that different from a deep-sea community; it’s full of viruses and bacteria struggling to survive in a tough environment… Read more at PNAS.