"Topological puzzles in biology: how structure shapes a system's evolution"Carja, OanaUnderstanding how the spatial arrangement of a population shapes its evolutionary dynamics has been of long-standing interest in evolutionary biology. However, most previous work assumes very regular symmetric structures, such as a small number of demes connected by migration corridors. This encoded regularity makes it hard to link these models to the influx of spatially resolved biological datasets that are revolutionizing molecular biology. In this talk I will explore how to think about and understand the role of complex spatial topologies in evolution and discuss the challenge of finding the right spatial geometric representations that can both capture the complexity of spatial structure in emerging datasets, but also allow for mathematical modeling tractability. |
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