Speaker:

Susanna Manrubia, Associate Professor, Spanish National Centre for Biotechnology (CSIC)

Title:

Evolutionary consequences of genotype spaces architecture: theoretical results and some empirical observations

Abstract:

Understanding how genotypes map onto phenotypes, fitness, and eventually organisms is arguably the next major missing piece needed to update evolutionary theory. Though we are still far from achieving a complete picture of these relationships, our current understanding of simpler questions, such as the structure induced in the space of genotypes by sequences mapped to molecular structures (the so-called genotype-phenotype map), has revealed important facts that deeply affect the dynamical description of evolutionary processes. We will present computational and theoretical advances towards characterizing the networked structure of genotype spaces, briefly describe some dynamical implications for sequence populations, and present related empirical results.

Speaker Bio:

Susanna Manrubia studied physics at the Universitat de Barcelona, and received her doctoral degree in 1996. She was a Humboldt fellow of the Max Planck Society at the Fritz-Haber-Institut in Berlin and a postdoctoral researcher at the MPI of Colloids and Interfaces in Golm. After several years at the Center for Astrobiology in Madrid, she is since 2014 associate professor of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology at the National Centre for Biotechnology (CSIC, Madrid). She focuses on developing theoretical and computational descriptions of biological phenomena, from the genome to large-scale evolution, and maintains close collaborations with experimentalists. Her interests include as well the emergence of cultural patterns and collective social behaviour. She has published over 130 peer reviewed articles and three books, was Section Editor for BMC Evolutionary Biology and is current member of the Editorial Board of Virus Evolution.

Webinar:

Video of this talk can be found on our YouTube Channel.

About the Speaker Series:

Wednesdays@NICO is a vibrant weekly seminar series focusing broadly on the topics of complex systems and data science. It brings together attendees ranging from graduate students to senior faculty who span all of the schools across Northwestern, from applied math to sociology to biology and every discipline in-between. Please visit: https://bit.ly/WedatNICO for information on future speakers.

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