Bitbol Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2019

Optimization and historical contingency in living systems: a biophysical approach

Populations of living organisms are pushed to optimality by evolution, but may also be shaped by the contingency of their evolutionary history. The recent explosion of sequence data gives us access to the outcomes of molecular evolution, and controlled microbial evolution experiments allow us to analyze the predictability of evolution. In this exciting context, I aim to explore quantitatively the importance of optimization and contingency both at the molecular scale and at the scale of populations of microorganisms, using a theoretical biophysical approach. First, I will assess how functional optimization and evolutionary history, i.e. phylogeny, shape protein sequences. Importantly,…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.