Animal behaviors are complex and hierarchical spatiotemporal patterns. In the popular model organism Caenorhabditis elegans, behavioral sequences on a slower timescale emerge from ordered and flexible transitions between different motor states, such as forward movement, reversal, and turn. On a faster timescale, intricate head…
Behavioral strategies employed for chemotaxis have been studied across phyla, but the neural computations underlying navigational decisions remain elusive. By combining electrophysiology, quantitative behavioral analysis and computational modeling, we explore how olfactory signals experienced during free motion are processed by the olfactory…
Growth is central to life, shaping physiology, ecology, and evolution. In this talk, I discuss our efforts to elucidate the causes and consequences of bacterial growth across scales. Starting from resource allocation models and the molecular and energetic demands of protein synthesis, I first introduce how bacterial cells adjust their…
Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic bacterial pathogen. Most P. aeruginosa isolates are infected by a filamentous virus (phage) called Pf. At sites of infection, filamentous Pf virions accumulate where they increase mucus viscosity, promote bacterial colonization, and directly stimulate innate anti-viral immune…
Featuring talks from
Danqi Chen, Princeton University
Irina Risch, MILA
Alexander Rush, Cornell University
Ami S Bhatt, Stanford University
Nuno Miguel Oliveira, DAMPT Cambridge
Forest Rohwer, San Diego State University
Registration TBA
Many of the physical processes in a cell consume energy, but we are only beginning to understand how these costs have influenced the course of evolution. Biology is strewn with counter-intuitively complex mechanisms whose evolutionary predecessors must have consumed significant energy resources without any clear fitness benefit. So…