The EDEN project
EDEN (Ecological Diversity and Evolutionary Networks) is a research project supported by the New and Emerging Science and Technology programme
(NEST)
of the 6th Framework Programme of the
European Commission, under the
NEST-Pathfinder Complexity iniciative. It started on 1st January 2007 and will run for three years.
Here is a descriptive Fact Sheet of the project prepared by the EC services
The EDEN objectives
Biological systems and their highly organized constituents are paradigms of Complexity. The study of Complex Networks, representing interactions among components, has become central in the science of Complex Systems.
The EDEN proposal aims at considering in depth the representation of
ecological and evolutionary relationships among biological entities
-organisms, populations, taxa- in terms of networks by developing methods to
construct them from genetic data and by expanding the toolbox for their
analysis. Evolutionary relationships between species are usually represented
in phylogenies, i.e. evolutionary trees. Intraspecific gene genealogies and
population structure are also conventionally represented as tree-like
objects. However, processes such as sexual reproduction or lateral gene
transfer introduce cycles and need richer structures -networks- to be
properly represented. EDEN will develop tools to build networks of ecological
and of evolutionary relationships from genetic data, and study them with the
modern methods of network theory. More specifically, EDEN will focus on:
- Networks of genetic diversity, constructed from genetic data of a large sample of marine plants in coastal ecosystems. Innovative network methods will be developed to address questions on population structure, gene flow, evolution, biogeography and conservation of these threatened ecosystems.
-
The tools of reticulate evolution, and novel approaches based on network
theory will be used to build and analyze phylogenies with rich structure
beyond trees. The aim is to gain biological insight on the evolution of life,
from specific lineages to the entire spectrum of life forms, by evolving from
the present concept of a `Tree of Life' to a more flexible concept of
`Network of Life'.
The synergy between extensive data collection and analysis together with individual-based modelling (including genetic, ecological, and spatial factors) will be pursued in all these focus cases.
EDEN partners
EDEN is developed by a international collaboration among the following teams:
- IFISC/IMEDEA-UIB
- The University of the Balearic Islands (UIB), at Palma de Mallorca, Spain, is the coordinating institution. It participates through its research institutes IFISC (Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Physics and Complex Systems) and IMEDEA (Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Studies), both joint research centers with the Spanish Higher Research Council (CSIC).
- CCMAR
- The Center of Marine Sciences (CCMAR), a leading center in Marine Genomics at Faro, Portugal, participates through its Ecology and Evolution of Marine Plants and Algae (MAREE) team.
- BioInf Leipzig
- Leipzig University, Institute for Computer Science, The Bioinformatics Group, from the Institute for Computer Science of Leipzig University, Germany (Bioinf Leipzig), is part of the Bioinformatics initiative of the German research council (DFG).
- TKK/LCE
- The Laboratory of Computational Engineering (LCE), at the Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, is a Finish national Center of Excellence in Computational Complex Systems Research.
