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The EDEN project

FP6-logo 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

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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.

Tree of Life 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:

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.

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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.

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