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A tale of two microbes : using biophysics to study the origin of multicellularity and resolve the dynamics of microbial warfare.
In this talk, I’ll present recent results from two different systems in our lab that highlight the critical role played by cell-scale biophysics in evolutionary biology. First, we focus on the evolution of multicellularity. While multicellularity has evolved multiple times in the history of life on Earth, we know little about how simple groups of cells evolve to form larger, more mechanically robust bodies. I will talk about how we use our ’snowflake yeast’ model system to evolve multicellularity de novo, and examine how Darwinian evolution solves problems of cellular packing that result in the evolution of larger, more mechanically robust cellular groups. Second, I will talk about our work examining how microbial antagonism (neighbor-killing via the T6SS) in a surface-attached bacterium drives a Model A order-disorder transition, resulting in spatially-structured groups which support the evolution of cooperation.