Conference: The Social Lives of Viruses Meeting

This award will fund a two-day conference at the Verdanza Hotel in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in June 2024 that will focus on viral social interactions. Viruses, often thought of as solitary entities, are in fact highly social. Evolutionary cooperation is key to the success of many viruses, underlying key traits such as genome replication and the construction of virions. At the same time, cooperation often breaks down in viruses, with exploitative viral cheats evolving de novo in almost all known viruses, driving viral population dynamics, evolution, and pathogenicity. Viral social interactions can affect every stage of the viral lifecycle, occur across the virosphere, and raise new questions for the evolution of sociality with broad implications across evolutionary biology. The combination of recent discoveries, new methods, and growing interdisciplinary interest, means that the time is ripe to exploit the social lives of viruses. However, the possibilities of this field are currently being held back, because evolutionary biologists are often unaware of the diversity, importance, or even existence, of social traits in viruses, while virologists only rarely make use of evolutionary theories and concepts that link social traits in viruses to other areas of biology. The conference will target key topics for which synthesis between virologists and evolutionary biologists is most useful: cheating in viruses; sociality across the virosphere; social evolution theory for viruses; new model systems; viral communication and cooperation. The principal objective of the meeting will be to foster new interdisciplinary collaborations to drive progress within the emerging field of sociovirology. There will be two additional objectives: (1) publish a perspective piece on sociovirology highlighting conceptual advances made during the meeting; and (2) provide information about the meeting and sociovirology as a whole in a format that can be widely disseminated to the general public, such as a podcast, YouTube video, or publication in print media. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.