Global effort aims to unravel evolution of reproduction in living organisms
The Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) forms part of an international consortium that is preparing the Tree of Sex project, an ambitious initiative aimed at decoding the evolutionary complexity of reproductive strategies across eukaryotic life.
The project's multidisciplinary consortium brings together experts in evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology and bioinformatics from around the world, with the aim of creating the most comprehensive and accessible database on reproduction in eukaryotes.
By integrating genomic, transcriptomic, and ecological data—much of which was previously limited or unavailable—the new phase of the Tree of Sex project significantly expands upon the original initiative launched a decade ago. The research team provides the details of this project in a recent publication in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
The UAB will be represented by Dr. Aurora Ruiz-Herrera, Full Professor in the Department of Cell Biology, Physiology and Immunology, and researcher at the Institut de Biotecnologia i Biomedicina (IBB-UAB) and ICREA Acadèmia.
The group led by UAB researcher Dr. Ruiz-Herrera recently published several projects that emphasize the importance of integrating molecular and evolutionary data into studies on reproduction. Among them is a study on the initial differentiation mechanisms of sexual chromosomes in Australian marsupials that provides a new perspective on the evolution of sex in mammals.
"The Tree of Sex Project is a unique opportunity to integrate molecular, cellular and ecological data under a common evolutionary framework," affirms Aurora Ruiz-Herrera.
"Reproduction is a universal phenomenon, but its diversity is amazing. Understanding it will help us answer fundamental questions about the evolution of sex, sexual chromosomes and the process of new species formation (speciation)."
An open and collaborative infrastructure
The main goal of the Tree of Sex consortium is to create and maintain a global database. To do so, it is developing a flexible infrastructure that will allow researchers from different disciplines to work together, to add data to other biological databases, to create a centralized scientific literature repository, and develop a clearly defined ontology describing the relations among all the data collected.
The data model is designed to adapt to different levels of knowledge per species and allows for multiple registries of the same information. The platform will be public, stable and sustainable, allowing access to reproductive knowledge for years to come.
The consortium is also committed to maintaining high ethical standards when gathering, using and sharing data. It will also continue to be active even after the creation of the database, providing a collaborative framework for future studies.
More information:
Daniel Jeffries et al, The Tree of Sex consortium: A global initiative for studying the evolution of reproduction in eukaryotes, Journal of Evolutionary Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1093/jeb/voaf053
Provided by Autonomous University of Barcelona
