Room: ACS 362C
Speaker: Dr. Cameron Browne (University of Louisiana at Lafayette)
Title: Eco-evolutionary dynamics in prey-predator networks applied to HIV immune escape.
Abstract: Population dynamics and evolutionary genetics underly the structure of ecosystems. For example, during HIV infection, the virus escapes several immune response populations via resistance mutations, precipitating a dynamic network of interacting virus and immune variants. I will talk about recent work to link virus population genetics with dynamics theoretically and through data. We analyze a resource-prey-predator differential equation network model to characterize the emergence of distinct stable equilibria and persistence of different diverse collections of virus and immune populations. Using binary sequences to code viral strain resistance to immune responses, we prove that bifurcations are determined and simplified by a certain evolutionary genetics measure of nonlinearity in the map from viral sequences to fitness (reproductive rate) landscape. The results generalize to decipher stability, structure and invasion of ecological networks based on the linear algebra of prey binary sequences encoding predation and fitness trade-offs. Finally, numerical simulations and an interdisciplinary application to virus-immune data illustrate our eco-evolutionary modeling framework.
