A broad group of Experts from all over the world In areas such as evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology and bioinformatics around the world have joined a common name project Sex tree To try the Secrets associated with the reproductive evolution of living beings.
And among those professionals there are also people who are part of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) Also take shape in this consortium worldwide and that they defend that this initiative is “a unique opportunity to integrate molecular, cellular and ecological data into a common evolutionary framework.”
This project is designed in such a way that it can be adapted to different levels of knowledge per type that make it possible to have countless records of the same information. Moreover, this consortium will be public, stable and durable by what Access to reproductive knowledge will be facilitated over the years.
UAB participates in an international project to decipher reproductive evolution in living beings
The Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB) participates in the international consortium that the Tree of Sex Project, seek an ambitious scientific initiative Understand the great diversity of reproductive strategies of eukaryotic organisms.
The multidisciplinary consortium of the project brings experts together in evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology and bioinformatics around the world, with the aim of building the most complete and accessible database over eukaryotic reproduction. The new phase of the sex tree of sex will considerably expand the scope of the original project, which was created ten years ago, by integrating genomic, transcriptomic and ecological data that were previously scarce or not -best for. The researchers team has detailed the project in detail in an article in Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
The UAB is represented by Aurora Ruiz-Herrera, professor of the Cell Biology, Physiology and Immunology department, researcher at the Biomedicine I Institute of Biomedicin (IBB-UB) and ICEA Acadèmia. The research group led by the UAB researcher recently published various works that strengthen the importance of integrating molecular and evolutionary data in the study of reproduction. Among them an investigation into the first mechanisms of differentiation of sexual chromosomes in Australian marsupials that offers a new perspective on the evolution of sex in mammals.
“The tree of the Sex project is a unique opportunity to integrate molecular, cellular and ecological data into a common evolutionary framework”Says Aurora Ruiz-Herrera. «Reproduction is a universal phenomenon, but its diversity is amazing. Insight into it will help us answer fundamental questions about the evolution of sex, sex chromosomes and the formation processes of new species, which we call specialization ».
The central goal of the tree of the sex consortium is to create and Maintain a worldwide databaseFor what a flexible infrastructure develops this collaboration work between researchers from different disciplines, integration with other biological databases, creating a centralized repository of scientific literature and the development of a well -defined ontology that describes the relationships between all collected data.
The data model is designed to adapt to different knowledge levels through species and makes multiple records of the same information possible. The platform will be public, stable and sustainable, that facilitates access to reproductive knowledge over the years.
The consortium also connects to stay high Ethical standards for collecting, using and distributing the data. Moreover, it will remain active after creating the database, and it will function as a cooperation framework for future research.