A School of Biological Sciences seminar, hosted by Professor Andy Radford

Behavioural ecology is a field most people associate with watchable things like birds, insects and mammals and not bacterial cells. There’s a very good reason for this: how do we make testable hypotheses about adaptation in organisms if we can’t observe them in the environment to which they are adapted? I’ve spent the last decade trying to solve this problem in the specific case of bacteria living inside the lungs of people with cystic fibrosis. While I’ve made some progress (come along to find out more), it remains a major challenge for biologists to apply our understanding of adaptive processes to life on the scale of molecules and cells.