Pam Yeh: University of California, Los Angeles

All natural populations deal with multiple stressors. Yet there is limited understanding of how populations are impacted by higher-order interactions — more than two stressors. In this talk I will explain my new conceptual and experimental work to examine higher-order interactions among antibiotics in bacterial populations. I will also present recent work from my group that shows bacteria likely co-opted ancient stress response mechanisms to extreme temperatures in order to deal with more recent antibiotic stresses. This co-opting avoids the need for de novo evolution of response mechanisms to antibiotics.