Two Quantitative Life Sciences Seminars - 19 and 20 December

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

_*2 Quantitative Life Sciences  Seminars:*_

*Monday 19 December at 11:00*
ICTP, Central Area, 2nd floor, old SISSA building

"Rapid adaptation and the predictability of evolution"

Richard Neher, Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology, 
Tuebingen, Germany

Abstract:
Evolution is simple if adaptive mutations appear one at a time. However, 
in large microbial populations many mutations arise simultaneously 
resulting in a complex dynamics of competing variants. I will discuss 
recent insight into universal properties of such rapidly adapting 
populations and compare model predictions to whole genome deep 
sequencing data of HIV-1 populations at many consecutive time points. 
Genetic diversity data can further be used to infer fitness of 
individuals in a population sample and predict successful genotypes. We 
validate these prediction using historical influenza virus sequence 
data. Successful predictions of the composition of future influenza 
virus population could guide strain selection for seasonal influenza 
vaccines.

Web page: http://indico.ictp.it/event/8089/

******************************************************************************

Tuesday 20 December at 11:00*
ICTP, Central Area, 2nd floor, old SISSA building

"Collective behavior in systems of self-propelled particles and the 
computational approach"

Mihir Durve - University of Trieste -  Department of Physics

Abstract:
Many natural and artificial systems consist of agents that have ability 
to show persistent motion. Flock of birds, school of fish, human crowd, 
bacterial colonies are few of the examples. Agents in such system are 
called `Self-propelled Particles' (SPPs). Another remarkable property of 
the agents in such systems is the ability to exhibit collective 
behavior. The beautiful pattern formation in flock of Starling birds or 
school of fish is just one of the many outcomes of the collective 
behavior[1].

There are numerous computational models to understand the collective 
behavior in such systems. These models aim to understand the formation 
of such patterns, the mechanism behind the collective behavior. One of 
the notable model is given by Vicsek et al. now commonly known as the 
`Vicsek model'. This minimal model assumes that the agent in the system 
try to behave as it's neighbors do[2]. With this simple but yet 
effective assumption this model showed some of the prominent features of 
the collective behavior.

In this session we shall discuss about the systems with SPPs, the Vicsek 
model and one of the modification to the Vicsek model motivated by the 
fact that biological agents such as humans, birds, fish etc. have 
restricted view-angle and hence such agents interact anisotropically 
with its neighbors if the interaction is via visual clues. We shall 
discuss the effects on the collective behavior of SPPs due to this 
modification within the scope of the Vicsek model.

Ref.:
[1] T. Vicsek and A. Zafeiris, Phys. Rep. 517, 71 (2012).

[2] T. Vicsek, A. Czir ok, E. Ben-Jacob, I. Cohen, and O. Shochet, Phys. 
Rev. Lett. 75, 1226 (1995).

Web page: http://indico.ictp.it/event/8108/



-- 
Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-2240623
e-mail: qls at ictp.it