Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are complex, storing information and imparting memory that gives rise to multi-scale structures  spanning collections of cells to entire ecosystems. We outline the fundamental attributes and emergent phenomena associated with dormancy and seed banks with the goal of developing a unifying framework that can address problems in the life sciences, ranging from global change to cancer biology.
Across the tree of life, populations have evolved the capacity to contend with suboptimal conditions by engaging in dormancy, whereby individuals enter a reversible state of reduced metabolic activity. The resulting seed banks are complex, storing information and imparting memory that gives rise to multi-scale structures and networks spanning collections of cells to entire ecosystems. We outline the fundamental attributes and emergent phenomena associated with dormancy and seed banks , with the vision for a unifying and mathematically based framework that can address problems in the life sciences, ranging from global change to cancer biology.
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and networks
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with the goal of developing a unifying
, with the vision for a unifying and mathematically based