When Grown In Vitro, do Parasites of Multicellular Organisms (MOPs) become Unicellular Organism Parasites (UOPs)?
The Bacteriophage Ecology Group (BEG) is concerned, of course, with the ecology of bacteriophages. When modeling bacteriophage growth, especially in liquid culture, the dynamics of host acquisition by bacteriophages should essentially resemble those of any organism that acquires its “prey” through random diffusion. Of organisms that obtain their resources directly from other living organisms, we may, of course, further subdivide into (i) those that acquire no more than one “prey” per lifetime (the parasites) and (ii) those that acquire more than one “prey” per lifetime (the predators). An individual bacteriophage clearly cannot acquire more than one “prey” (or host) in a lifetime so clearly, by these definitions, is more parasite-like than predator-like. Among parasites we may further subdivide into (i) those parasites that infect multicellular organisms and (ii) those parasites that infect unicellular organisms. From the standpoint of a parasite, the former, but not the latter, is sup
