A large majority of all sequenced bacterial isolates are latently infected by viruses; however, our understanding of how the viruses affect the evolutionary trajectories of their partners is understudied, and the benefit to the viruses within this context is often considered only from a bacterial perspective. Graduate student Laura Suttenfield and Rachel Whitaker, in collaboration with James Slauch and Zoi Rapti, propose to assess how viral fitness evolves in a context where vertical transmission is enforced by a lack of susceptible hosts. They hypothesize that selection for viral vertical transmission results in lowered spontaneous induction of the virus and adaptation of the hosts to their virus before the environment.