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Event

Seminar Series in Quantitative Life Sciences and Medicine

Tuesday, February 26, 2019 12:00to13:00
Montreal Neurological Institute deGrandpre Communications Centre, 3801 rue University, Montreal, QC, H3A 2B4, CA

How adaptive immunity constrains the composition and fate of large bacterial populations

Sidartha Goyal (University of Toronto)
Tuesday February 26, 12-1pm
deGrandpre Communication Centre, Montreal Neurological Institute

Abstract:Ìýµþ²¹³¦³Ù±ð°ù¾±²¹ learn from past viral attacks by integrating small segments of viral genomes (spacers) into their DNA to neutralize future attacks. This memory of past attacks is then inherited along a bacterium’s lineage suggesting its effect on the fate and structure of the whole microbial population. Emphasizing the population-level impact of the adaptive immunity, recent experiments show that some bacteria regulate adaptive-immunity-associated genes via the quorum-sensing (QS) pathway. I will present a model that shows how from the highly stochastic dynamics of individual spacers emerges a rank-abundance distribution of spacers that is time invariant, a surprising prediction that is consistent with dynamic spacer-tracking data in experiments. This distribution depends on the state of the competing virus–bacteria population, which due to QS-based control exhibits multiple stable states with drastically different virus-bacterium composition.

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