What Can We Learn by Integrating Ecological Processes into Evolutionary Inference?

A Department of Computational Biology  Seminar

Featuring Dr. Lawrence Uricchio, Assistant Professor, Department of Biology, Tufts University

Theoretical approaches in both population genetics and population ecology have provided substantial insights into the mechanistic processes that shape biological diversity. Though many models in the two fields are mathematically similar, evolutionary genetics approaches typically use backwards-in-time logic to explain contemporary diversity while ecologists often apply forwards-in-time thinking to predict future diversity. A growing body of evidence – both theoretical and empirical – suggests that this implicit separation of ecological and evolutionary time-scales may result in misleading inferences or conclusions. In this talk I will describe three broad areas in which our lab hopes to combine evolutionary and ecological thinking. First, we develop an approach for inferring genomic regions involved in interspecific interactions. Second, we apply epidemiological modeling to host-virus evolution to study how costly resistance may evolve. And third, we consider how rapid environmental change may affect patterns of diversity for traits subject to multiple modes of selection.

Faculty Host: Dr. Jaehee Kim