Alaina Weinheimer (ocean virology)

Maine Science Podcast · Aug 31, 2023 · 36m

Alaina Weinheimer is a postdoctoral fellow at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences where she examines how bacteria fight viruses in the ocean. She is particularly interested in jumbo phages, which are phages with really large genomes (> 200 kb). Until recently, they have been largely overlooked in both culture-based and sequencing studies due to their unusually large size that rivals bacteria!

While pursuing her bachelor’s degree in Biology at Penn State, Alaina worked in coral reef ecology labs where she was exposed to the numerous threats to coral and the potential roles of microbes…