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Evolutionary phase transitions in random environments
Bacteria can use memory mechanisms to increase long term growth rates in rapidly changing environments. In this talk, I will discuss experiments that show the existence of phenotypic memory in E.coli during metabolic transitions. I will present theoretical results on the optimization of memory levels, which were obtained by a new analytical method for calculations of long-term growth rates in randomly changing environments. I describe several distinct evolutionary phase transitions associated with memory optimization, and the structure of the resulting phase diagram. The results have implications for the evolution of gene regulation and motivate further experiments.