How much cyanobacterial mortality do these viruses cause each day? What defenses do the cyanobacteria use against viruses? What are the functions of virus genes during infection? In our work we combine oceanographic field work, physiological experimentation and state-of-the-art molecular technologies to address these questions.
Debbie Lindell received her BSc, MSc and PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and carried out her MSc and PhD research at the Interuniversity Institute for Marine Sciences (IUI) in Eilat. During her MSc research she found pronounced seasonal succession between different phytoplankton populations in the Red Sea. In her PhD she studied nitrogen utilization in marine cyanobacteria and developed a gene expression method for assessing the nitrogen status of Synechococcus field populations. Lindell carried out postdoctoral research training at MIT in the USA working on the physiological and evolutionary implications of photosynthesis genes in phages that infect the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus. Lindell is currently a Professor in the Faculty of Biology at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, where she studies host-virus interactions between marine cyanobacteria and cyanophages.