Speaker
Description
Proliferation rate is a central life-history trait linking ecological interactions and evolutionary changes. This talk reviews eco-evolutionary models in which reproduction rate explicitly evolves, generating feedback between ecological structure and trait dynamics that shapes community composition and diversity.
A generic interaction and agent-based model with a life-history trade-off is presented to demonstrate how evolving reproduction can reproduce canonical macro-evolutionary patterns, including disruptive selection and long-term coexistence without imposed niche separation, offering a dynamical perspective on competitive exclusion through eco-evolutionary self-organization.
These principles are then transferred to a phenotype-structured PDE model of tumor growth in which proliferation evolves under ecological constraints and treatment pressure. Embedding trait dynamics directly into population structure generalizes classical growth models and enables systematic comparison of treatment modalities in terms of their impact on proliferation heterogeneity. The framework reproduces some well-known characteristics of clinical endpoints of cytotoxic therapies and elucidates how therapeutic pressure on proliferation reshapes tumor structure and influences long-term tumor dynamics.
Overall, this trait-based eco-evolutionary perspective across biological systems clarifies how selection on proliferation affects diversity, coexistence, and responses to perturbations.
