Evolutionary tradeoffs and the geometry of biological shape space

TYPEColloquium
Speaker:Prof. Uri Alon
Affiliation:Department of Molecular Cell Biology, WIS
Date:22.06.2015
Time:14:30
Location:Lidow Rosen Auditorium (323)
Abstract:

 


Organisms, tissues and molecules often need to perform multiple tasks. But usually no phenotype (biological design) can be optimal at all tasks at once. This leads to a fundamental tradeoff. We study this using the concept of Pareto optimality from engineering and economics. Tradeoffs lead to an unexpected simplicity in the range of optimal phenotypes- they fall on low dimensional shapes in trait space such as lines, triangles and tetrahedrons. At the vertices of these polygons are phenotypes that specialize at a single task. One does not need to know the tasks in advance; tasks  can be inferred from the data. We demonstrate this using animal and fossil morphology, bacterial and stem-cell gene expression and other biological systems.