Dr. Jay Lennon: Life in suspended animation: the evolutionary ecology of dormancy

Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are complex, storing information and imparting memory that gives rise to multi-scale structures and networks spanning collections of cells to entire ecosystems. After introducing some of the fundamental attributes and emergent phenomena associated with seed banks, I will discuss how dormancy can modify species interactions with implication for eco-evolutionary feedback. Specifically, using genomic and experimental approaches, I will demonstrate how sporulation in bacteria alters interactions with viruses (phages) in ways that can slow rates of evolution and the spread of pathogens in spatially structured environments.