Speaker
Prof.
Katarína Boďová
(Comenius University)
Description
Some plants have developed a clever strategy to cope with the cost of inbreeding. This strategy is realized through a genetically encoded recognition system, allowing the plant to distinguish between its own pollen and that of others. Based on this distinction the plant accepts or rejects the pollen. The complexity of this system, including high dimensionality and inherent randomness, makes understanding of maintenance and diversification of haplotypes challenging. Drawing inspiration from popular culture, we can represent this complex problem by a low-dimensional approximation, which is easier to understand than the original problem. This shows that both mathematics and watching movies may be useful in solving scientific questions.
