Jochen Blath (Goethe University)
Title: Probabilistic structures emerging from dormancy.
Abstract: Throughout the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to聽contend with sub-optimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby聽individuals enter a reversible state of vanishing metabolic activity. The聽resulting "seed banks" serve as long-lived reservoirs of genetic and聽phenotypic diversity. Of particular relevance is the case of microbial聽dormancy, which has a fundamental impact on the evolutionary, ecological and also聽pathogenic character of microbial communities.
However, despite its ubiquity in nature, dormancy is a rather new subject聽for stochastic individual based modeling and interacting particle systems.聽Here, it can introduce memory, resilience and diversity into the underlying聽systems. The resulting probabilistic structures are surprisingly rich,聽already when considering simple `toy models', and lead to new universal聽scaling limits.
In this talk, I briefly review some of the biological background for聽dormancy, highlight some recent mathematical models and results,
and sketch lines for future research.