Physics (Internal)

"Fate and Chance in Microbial Communities"

This event is part of the Biophysics Seminars. 12:30PM.

Microbial ecosystems are influenced by random processes over many scales, such as mutagenesis at the molecular scale, phenotypic switching at the organismal scale, and fluctuations in the external environment which can affect entire populations. It is not generally known how strongly these random processes induce randomness in population dynamics within communities. To separate deterministic trends from random fluctuations requires making measurements over many replicate systems, with well controlled environmental and initial conditions. I'll discuss such measurements we made in the lab, studying microbial ecosystems with three different experimental setups, and the potentially surprising implications for the role of randomness in microbial ecology.