Mar
23
March Café Scientifique with Holly Moeller
Posted by: jdewitt | March 23, 2017 | Leave a Comment
Dear Café Scientifiquers, our next café will happen on Tuesday March 28th, 7:30pm in the back room at Yagger’s Downtown (433 W Pender). Our speaker for the evening will be Dr. Holly Moeller, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine Biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The title of her talk is:
Trade, Borrow, or Steal: How Life Exceeds its Metabolic Potential
Living organisms are fundamentally constrained by their metabolisms: The ways that they get and use energy affect where they can live, how they respond to changing environments, and how they interact with one another. We usually think of metabolisms as fixed, permanent features of each species, fundamentally set by the genes encoded in their DNA. But what if metabolisms could be changed, within an individual’s lifetime, by borrowing (or stealing!) from other species? My talk will describe examples of this “acquired metabolism,” exploring how organisms from microbes to humans to trees extend their metabolisms and transform their ecological roles and evolutionary paths.