Speaker
William DeWitt
Description
Stochastic drift and adaptive determinism together shape populations
of functional sequences. Untangling these forces by studying natural
populations is challenging because a given evolutionary story is told
only once. We use an evolutionary system that can be run in replicate
—somatic evolution of antibody repertoires in jawed vertebrate immune
systems—as the context for tractable models that quantitatively
characterize the roles of contingency and determinism. Using data from
experimental model systems of increasing biological realism, we
develop theoretically-motivated computational methods to characterize
the evolutionary dynamics of antibody affinity maturation.
Primary author
William DeWitt
