Abstract: Many biological phenomena emerge from interaction and competition between its parts. I will share some examples across biological scales where data-driven theory can reveal new rules of biological competition. At the molecular scale competition between mitochondrial genomes within budding yeast depends on genome architecture; dynamics of adaptive immunity in microbes reveal different modalities of competition and coexistence of bacteria and its phages; in mammals cellular reprogramming may be driven by elite clones, and tumor response to drugs is driven by "epigenetic" switching. Going beyond, I will present some ideas on understanding dynamical systems that govern cell fate dynamics and if competition may play a role in it.

refs:

mitochondrial genomes - https://elifesciences.org/articles/76557

phage-bacteria - https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1802887115, https://elifesciences.org/articles/81692

mammalian - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30898844/, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33417860/

dynamical systems - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37708894/, https://tinyurl.com/mrxtjjsp

Biosketch: Sidhartha Goyal got his PhD in Physics at Princeton in 2009 and then moved to Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara for a postdoc. He got his first degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Bombay. He is now an Associate Professor in the Physics Department at

University of Toronto interested in collective phenomena in biology.