Berlin 2018 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 35: Statistical Physics of Biological Systems II (joint session BP/DY)
BP 35.8: Talk
Thursday, March 15, 2018, 17:00–17:15, H 2013
Specialisation and plasticity in interacting biological populations — Solenn Patalano1, •Adolfo Alsina2, Steffen Rulands2, and Wolf Reik1 — 1Babraham Institute, Cambridge, UK — 2Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany
The structure and dynamics of biological systems are tightly regulated on multiple scales, from transcriptional and epigenetic regulation to population level feedback. While many biological systems are surprisingly robust against environmental fluctuations they, simultaneously, exhibit a remarkable plasticity in response to changes in their environment. Using the social wasp Polistes as an example we combine experimental and theoretical methods to study how a primitive society simultaneously achieves phenotypic specialisation and a remarkable degree of plasticity. After perturbing the society by queen removal, we experimentally follow the relaxation dynamics into the social steady state across scales, from social and behavioural measurements to physiological measurements and detailed molecular characterisations of single wasps. We develop a theoretical framework that explains the emergence of the social structure of Polistes as a result of opposing dynamics on the molecular and the population scales. We show that such dynamics provide a general principle of how both specialization and plasticity can be achieved in biological systems. As well as elucidating mechanisms of epigenetic plasticity in wasps and other biological systems this study shows that the multiscale dynamics in primitive social insects provide a laboratory for non-equilibrium physics.