Olivier Zablocki (He/Him)

Research Scientist / Grant Writer, The Ohio State University
  • United States of America

About Olivier Zablocki

I have a dual appointment as a research scientist in the Sullivan Lab and as a Grant Writer at the Center of Microbiome Science, both at the Ohio State University. I'm passionate about better understanding the impact of virus communities in many environments (human gut, soils, oceans) and developing tools (e.g. long-read sequencing) to study viruses. In parallel, I love crafting scientific narratives for journal articles and grant proposals, in virus ecology and the broader microbiome sciences.

Intro Content

Nature Biotechnology

The quest to organize the prokaryotic virosphere

A rigorous classification system is foundational for biology. However, viruses offer particularly problematic classification challenges. This is because in any gram of soil or milliliter of seawater there can be many millions to billions of viruses. We can only recently “see” them (using molecular methods) and they are all busy exchanging genes between each other and with their hosts in ways that paradigms suggest should undermine any genome-based taxonomy. However, we wanted to ask the question of whether simply looking at shared genes between viruses using networks could get us on the right track towards organizing the mostly unknown and unmapped viral sequence space.

Popular Content

Topics

Channels contributed to:

Behind the Paper

Details

Online Elsewhere