A new period has begun in the Tree of Sex project. A large and ambitious initiative, launched 10 years ago, which now aims to detail and compile in much greater depth all the aspects included in the reproduction of eukaryotic organisms: those that have a cell nucleus (animals, plants, protozoa, fungi or also some bacteria). The consortium, which includes 150 members on an international scale, is led by a committee of 10 scientists who lead the teams that are in charge of the main tasks. Among them is Aurora Ruiz, professor in the Department of Cell Biology, Physiology and Immunology of the UAB and researcher at the Institute of Biotechnology and Biomedicine (IBB-UAB) and the ICREA Acadèmia (Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies). This initiative takes on special relevance today, May 22, World Biological Diversity Day.

 The questions that need to be resolved

The project has already been able to collect a lot of data so far, but now it opens another phase, defined in an article published in the English-speaking specialist journal Journal of Evolutionary Biology. In this new stage, the consortium asks the questions that are not yet resolved within this discipline and proposes to complete the information on molecular, cellular and ecological data. All this to advance and be able to understand much better the diversity of reproductive strategies of all eukaryotes: evolution of sex, of sex chromosomes and the process of speciation (differentiation until forming a new species).

The Research group led by Aurora Ruiz has recently published some works in this field, which visualize the importance of integrating this molecular and evolutionary data. Among them, one of the initial mechanisms that allows the differentiation of sex chromosomes in marsupials stands out, which provides new perspectives on the evolution of sex in mammals.

Future database 

Tree of Sex sets itself as a new milestone in the period that begins to create a shared and ordered database in this field, which will serve both researchers and those interested in different fields. It is about establishing a new repository, a large archive for the works already published and the data that are derived from them, with a homogeneous method for describing the different categories and the many relationships between the concepts.

The system will allow open access to the entire public, and it is proposed to maintain high ethical standards in the collection, use and dissemination of this data, and to be a nexus and a tool for the consortium, which will remain as the basis and reference of a collaborative framework in the research in this field.

Once created, the new database will be available at the domain treeofsex.ac.uk. Through the main website of the project, anyone who wishes can register to participate and contribute.