QLS Seminar - Monday, 21 September at 14h00 - "Understanding long term eco-evolutionary dynamics in microbial ecosystems"

[Quantitative Life Sciences]

Dear All,

On Monday, 21 September  at 14h00, Prof. Akshit Goyal (ICTS-TIFR 
Bangalore, India) will give a seminar titled:

*"Understanding long term eco-evolutionary dynamics in microbial ecosystems"

*One of the major challenges in organismal biology is to understand 
long-term eco-evolutionary dynamics in complex ecosystems. Understanding 
eco-evolution is challenging because community diversity can change 
dramatically over time due to eco-evolutionary feedbacks: new mutants 
arise during evolution and subsequently cause the extinction of 
residents via ecological interactions. Here, we simulate 
eco-evolutionary dynamics in microbial communities using repeated, 
sequential invasions by closely related mutants in a high-dimensional 
Microbial Consumer Resource Model (MiCRM) with cross-feeding. We 
identify an evolutionary quasi-steady state that arises from the 
interplay of ecological competition, metabolic constraints, and 
environmental filtering. In this state, strains align along an optimal 
direction in consumer preference while maintaining diversity in 
orthogonal directions. We show that this complex behavior can be 
understood using a simple stochastic model which predicts the dependence 
of the evolutionary steady-state diversity on the effect size of 
mutations and environmental variables. Our results suggest that the 
long-term eco-evolutionary dynamics of complex microbial ecosystems may 
be understood in terms of simple emergent models.

The seminar will take place in the *Common Area*, second floor, old 
SISSA building (Via Beirut, 2)

Indico: https://indico.ictp.it/event/11526

You are all most welcome to attend!

Best regards,

Erica

Erica Sarnataro
Group Secretary
Quantitative Life Sciences
The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP)
Trieste,  Italy
Tel. +39-040-22404623 (NEW PHONE NUMBER)
www.ictp.it/research/qls.aspx
e-mail:qls at ictp.it