IBB-UAB participates in an international project to decipher the evolution of reproduction in living beings
The group led by Aurora Ruiz-Herrera participates in the international consortium that promotes the Tree of Sex project, an ambitious scientific initiative that seeks to understand the great diversity of reproductive strategies of eukaryotic organisms.
The project’s multidisciplinary consortium brings together experts in evolutionary biology, genetics, ecology and bioinformatics from around the world with the aim of building the most comprehensive and accessible database on eukaryotic reproduction. The new phase of the Tree of Sex will significantly expand the scope of the original project, created a decade ago, by integrating genomic, transcriptomic and ecological data that were previously scarce or non-existent. The team of researchers has detailed the project in an article in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
The UAB is represented by Aurora Ruiz-Herrera, a researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB-UAB), full professor at the Department of Cell Biology, Physiology and Immunology, and ICREA Acadèmia. The research group led by the IBB-UAB researcher has recently published several works that reinforce the importance of integrating molecular and evolutionary data in the study of reproduction. Among them, a study on the initial mechanisms of differentiation of sex chromosomes in Australian marsupials stands out, which 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 into a common evolutionary framework,” says Aurora Ruiz-Herrera. “Reproduction is a universal phenomenon, but its diversity is formidable. Understanding it will help us answer fundamental questions about the evolution of sex, sex chromosomes and the process of forming new species, that is, speciation."
An open and collaborative infrastructure
The central objective of the Tree of Sex consortium is to create and maintain a global database, for which it is developing a flexible infrastructure that will allow collaborative work between researchers from different disciplines, integration with other biological databases, the creation of a centralized repository of scientific literature and the development of a well-defined ontology that describes the relationships between all the collected data.
The data model is designed to adapt to different levels of knowledge for each species and allows multiple records of the same information. The platform will be public, stable and sustainable, which will facilitate access to reproductive knowledge over the years.
The consortium is also committed to maintaining high ethical standards in the collection, use and dissemination of the data. In addition, it will remain active once the database has been created, functioning as a collaborative framework for future research.
The database will be available at treeofsex.ac.uk. The entire scientific community interested in reproductive biology can join the initiative.
Reference: Daniel Jeffries, Chiara Benvenuto, Astrid Böhne, Christelle Fraisse, Sònia Garcia, Paul Jay, Lukáš Kratochvíl, Caitlin E McDonough-Goldstein, Aurora Ruiz-Herrera, Cibele G Sotero-Caio, Nicole Valenzuela, Melissa A Wilson, Tree of Sex Consortium, Kamil S Jaron. «The Tree of Sex consortium: A global initiative for studying the evolution of reproduction in eukaryotes», Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 2025. voaf053, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeb/voaf053
News adapted from that published by the UAB on May 19, 2025.