Venue: FIAS Lecture Hall / online

Our next "CMMS Talks" event with a talk by Prof. Dr. Jochen Blath (Goethe University) will take place on Thursday, 16 November 2023 at 2 p.m. in the FIAS lecture hall.

Abstract:

Throughout the tree of life populations have evolved the capacity to contend with sub-optimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of vanishing metabolic activity. The resulting "seed banks" serve as long-lived reservoirs of genotypic and phenotypic diversity. Of particular relevance is the case of microbial dormancy, which has a fundamental impact on the evolutionary, ecological and also  pathogenic character of biological communities.

However, despite its ubiquity in nature, dormancy is a rather  new paradigm in stochastic interacting particle systems. Here, it leads to novel effects, in particular based on the introduction of memory, resilience and diversity into the underlying systems. The resulting probabilistic structures, arising on different scales,  are surprisingly rich, already when considering simple `toy models’, and lead to new universal behaviour.

In this talk, after providing some background on dormancy,  I will present and discuss recent models for dormancy and seed banks in population genetics, evolution and ecology. Along the line, I will indicate topics for future mathematical and interdisciplinary research.

____

We will run a Zoom session:

Zoom2 FIAS lädt Sie zu einem geplanten Zoom-Meeting ein. Thema: CMMS Talks WS 23/24

Meeting-ID: 876 8546 2244 Kenncode: 870812