Mathematics Colloquium: Post-Ostrom Colloquium: Modeling mutualisms in plants and cancer

2019-04-11

4:10pm SPARK 335

Fred Adler

Essentially every biological interaction has a combination of positive and negative feedbacks, but capturing that in models proves surprisingly difficult. I will discuss two models of so-called mutualisms. Using a resource-mediated interaction of plants with their soil microbiome, we will look at whether mutualisms buffer the system against environmental perturbations. With the second, a model of how cancer cells coopt the behavior of promoters of cell growth, we will try to understand why cancer is rare but possible.