Kurt Williamson

Biography:

Kurt Williamson is a native of Newark, Delaware. He received his B.S. in biochemistry from the University of Delaware. During those halcyon days, he spent his summers participating in undergraduate research projects. He was also known to moonlight as a painter, and as a teaching assistant in the Biology Department, which paid the bills and fueled his growing interest in science education, respectively. After completing his bachelor's degree, he paid off loans by painting murals in private homes for a year. Then he went on to graduate study in soil microbiology, quite unexpectedly, back at the University of Delaware. Soon-to-be-Dr. Williamson is currently finishing his Ph.D. in Plant and Soil Science. Thanks to his involvement with the MOVE project, he has been able to accomplish what most soil scientists view as inconceivable: to do research on a boat. He hopes to make a career out of playing in the dirt and educating undergraduates through rigorous, inquiry-based science courses. He currently resides in Delaware with his devastatingly beautiful wife, Beth.

Research Interests:

While we’ve made a lot of progress in understanding the role of viruses in marine ecosystems, the role of viruses in soil ecosystems is largely unmapped territory. Much of our current knowledge of viral dynamics in soils has been derived from wastewater management studies. Enteric phages (which infect bacteria of the mammalian digestive tract) are often used as models to track the movement and elimination of pathogens in wastewater as it infiltrates soil. Enteric phages, however, are presumably adapted to the hazards of the mammalian colon, so they may not be reliable models of autochthonous soil phage dynamics.

While understanding the fate and transport of exogenous pathogens is important, very few studies have examined the role of autochthonous viruses in soil ecosystems. And of these few, almost all have been limited by their reliance upon cultured phage isolates. The primary goal of my research is to find out more about the ecology of native soil-dwelling viruses, using culture-independent approaches such as pulsed-field electrophoresis, isoelectric focusing, and metagenomic sequencing. The hope is that phage community changes can be linked to changes in the host (bacterial) community, yielding greater insight into the role and impact of bacteriophages in soil ecosystems.

Publications:

Hewson, I., D.M. Winget, K.E. Williamson, J.E. Fuhrman, and K.E. Wommack. 2006. Viral and bacterial assemblage of covariance in oligotrophic waters of the West Florida Shelf (Gulf of Mexico). J. Mar. Biol. 86:1-13

Williamson, K.E., M. Radosevich and K.E. Wommack. 2005. Abundance and Diversity of Bacteriophages in Six Delaware Soils. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 71:3119-3125.

Williamson, K.E.. 2005. Review of Viruses and the Evolution of Life, by Luis P. Villarreal. BioScience 55: 1084-1085.

D.M. Winget, K.E. Williamson, R.R. Helton, K.E. Wommack. 2005. Tangential flow diafiltration: an improved technique for estimation of virioplankton production. Aquat. Microb. Ecol. 41:221-232.

Bettarel, Y., Kan, J., Wang, K., Williamson, K. E., Cooney, S., Ribblett, S., Chen, F., Wommack, K. E. & Coats, D. W. 2005. Isolation and preliminary characterisation of a small nuclear inclusion virus infecting the diatom Chaetocerus cf. gracilis. Aquatic Microbial Ecology, 40: 103-114.

K.E. Williamson, K.E. Wommack, and M. Radosevich. 2003. Sampling natural viral communities from soil for culture-independent analyses. Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 69:6628-6633.

Radosevich, M., K.E. Williamson, and K.E. Wommack. Ecology of indigenous bacteriophage. In: Encyclopedia of Soils in the Environment. D. Hillel, C. Rosenweig, D. Powlson, K. Skow, M. Singer, and D.L. Sparks eds., Elsiver, LTD. 2005, p. 122-129.

Presentations:

Helton, R.R., K.E. Williamson, and K.E. Wommack. 2006. Get the phage out: issues in aquatic sediment virus removal for abundance and diversity analyses. The Scientific Committee for Oceanographic Research (SCOR)-working group on marine viruses., The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

K.E Williamson, K.E. Wommack, and M. Radosevich, 2005. Incidence of lysogeny among soil bacteria. American Society for Microbiology, Atlanta, GA.

Simon, M.S., K.E. Williamson and K.E. Wommack. 2005. Detection and identification of RNA viruses in the environment using randomly primed RT-PCR. American Society for Microbiology, Atlanta, GA.

K.E. Williamson, K. E. Wommack, and M. Radosevich, 2004. Comparison of viral communities in six Delaware soils. International Symposium on Microbial Ecology, International Society for Microbial Ecology, Cancun, Mexico.

Simon, M.S., K.E. Williamson and K.E. Wommack. 2004. Quantification of aquatic RNA viruses from a mixed viral sample. Delaware Water Resource Center Symposium, Newark, DE.

Simon, M.S., K.E. Williamson and K.E. Wommack. 2004. Enumeration of aquatic RNA viruses from a mixed viral sample. National Institutes of Health Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (NIH-BRIN) Symposium, Newark, DE.

Williamson S.J., K.E. Williamson, R.R. Helton, and K.E. Wommack. 2004. Lysogenic virus-host interactions predominate in deep-sea diffuse-flow hydrothermal vent environments. International Symposium for Microbial Ecology, Cancun, Mexico.

K.E Williamson, K.E. Wommack, and M. Radosevich, 2003. Extracting viruses from soil for culture-independent analyses. American Society for Microbiology, Washington, DC.

Wommack, K.E., K.E. Williamson, D.M. Winget, R. White, R.R. Helton, and D.L. Kirchman. 2003. An improved method for estimation of virioplankton production. Ocean Sciences Meeting, Salt Lake City, UT.

Wommack, K.E., K.E. Williamson, D.M. Winget, R.R. Helton, S. Bench, F. Chen, K. Wang, J Kan, D. W. Coats, S. Cooney, and Y. Bettarel. 2003. Microbial Observatory for Virioplankton Ecology (MOVE): The role of viruses in the annual biological cycle of the Chesapeake Bay. NSF Microbial Observatories Workshop, Arlington, VA.

K.E Williamson, K.E. Wommack, and M. Radosevich, 2001. Extracting bacteriophages from soil. International Annual Meeting, Soil Science Society of America, Charlotte, NC.