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Monday Seminar: March 19, 2007 4pm in Biosciences West (map), Room 301"The evolution and resolution of a 'tragedy of the commons' in a host-pathogen metapopulation" Monday seminar straight after spring break (Mar 19) will be given by Ben Kerr (visit his website). Ben is a really fascinating guy with an exceptionally wide range of interests. Ben is available for appointments on Monday Mar 19 and also on Tuesday before 3:45pm. To meet with him, please email Joanna Masel at masel@u.arizona.edu with your availability. |
| Talk Abstract: Recent studies have suggested that the manner in which hosts of disease-causing organisms move and contact one another can have profound ramifications on the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of the disease itself. We are using a model host-pathogen system to address the role of such "population structure" in the ecology and evolution of disease. The model host is the bacterium Escherichia coli and the model pathogen is a virus (or bacteriophage) that infects and kills the bacterium. From knowledge of how isolated populations of the bacterium and its virus interact, we construct a theoretical framework for exploring how metapopulations behave. Theoretical predictions are then tested experimentally with metapopulations of bacteria and bacteriophage using a high throughput robot to perform migrations between subpopulations. We find that the way in which migration takes place between subpopulations affects the ecological dynamics of the host-pathogen system. Furthermore, the topology of the metapopulation influences the evolution of the pathogen. We find that a "tragedy of the commons" evolves in our simple system, where "rapacious" bacteriophage that overexploit their bacterial host can outcompete "prudent" bacteriophage that use their host in a more restrained manner. This "tragedy" is resolved differently depending on how the metapopulation is structured. We believe there are potential connections of this work to the evolution of avirulence in disease systems, prudent predation in predator-prey systems, and the evolution of cooperation more generally. |
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