Speaker Name: Prof. Supreet Saini

Date: 22-10-2025 (Wednesday)

Time: 2:30 PM

Venue: LC002

Abstract: The history of life can be read as a continuous cycle of species emerging, adapting, and going extinct. Understanding the principles that govern these transitions remains one of the deepest challenges in evolutionary biology. In his group, they approach this problem through the lens of systems biology, combining mathematical modeling, experimental evolution, and genomics to uncover how molecular and physiological changes scale up to shape evolutionary trajectories.

He will discuss how we think about the three fates of every species. First, how new species arise, the process of speciation, and how ecological interactions can generate diversity even in seemingly uniform environments. Second, how species adapt, and whether the impact of mutations can be predicted from the architecture and constraints of cellular metabolism. Finally, why species go extinct, exploring the limits of adaptation and how physiological boundaries define the edge of evolutionary possibility.

By evolving microbes such as _E. coli_ and _S. cerevisiae across thousands of generations and coupling experiments with theory, we aim to extract general principles that connect molecular change to evolutionary fate, thus revealing how complexity, diversity, and even extinction arise from simple, reproducible rules.