Condensed Matter/Materials & Biological Physics Seminar with Sergey Kryazhimskiy on Statistical regularities

Adaptive evolution can lead to profound changes in the phenotypes and behaviors of biological systems, sometimes with adverse and sometimes with beneficial consequences for human health, agriculture and industry. However, predicting these changes remains difficult. One major challenge is that how new mutations alter phenotypes and fitness of organisms often depends on the genetic background in which they arise (G×G interactions or “epistasis”), the environment (G×E interactions), or both (G×G×E interactions). In this talk, I will discuss our recent experimental efforts to measure these interactions in budding yeast, the statistical regularities that we found so far and the theory that we have been developing to understand how these regularities constrain the dynamics of adaptation.