ERC Synergy Grant for Anja Spang and colleagues to trace the history of life on Earth

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Anja Spang on the beach (photo: Anneke Hymmen)

Anja Spang on the beach (photo: Anneke Hymmen)

NIOZ evolutionary microbiologist Anja Spang and three international colleagues have been awarded an ERC Synergy Grant for INTREEG. The team will combine new methods for reconstructing evolutionary trees integrating machine learning approaches to trace the history of life on Earth, from its earliest origins to the vast diversity of life that shapes our planet today.

 

The project, Integrating interactions into phylogenetics to reconstruct genome and biosphere evolution, brings together Anja Spang (NIOZ, the Netherlands), deep learning expert Bastien Boussau (CNRS, Lyon, France), computational phylogeneticist Gergely Szöllősi (OIST, Japan) and palaeobiologist Tom A. Williams (Bath, UK).

Tracing the tree of life through interactions 

“We have made significant progress in recent years in resolving the relationships among living organisms and reconstructing key ancestors in the tree of life,” says Spang. “But this is an incomplete picture because it is based on phylogenetic methods that ignore interactions due to computational limitations. Life is fundamentally built on interactions that hold crucial information, for example between sites in proteins, between proteins in pathways, and between organisms within communities.”

In INTREEG, the team will integrate information from interactions to overcome those limitation and address key questions that have been out of reach so far. By developing interaction-aware phylogenomics approaches integrating machine learning, they aim to shed light on the earliest transitions in cellular evolution, establish how microbes, macrobes and the biosphere diversified together and investigate how now extinct lineages shaped evolution. 

 

Diagram of the tree of life across a geological timescale. Branching lineages extend from the origin of life and are grouped into Bacteria, Eukaryotes and Archaea. A coloured scale on the right marks the Hadean, Archean, Proterozoic and Phanerozoic.

Tree of life along a geoligical timescale including now extinct lineages (illustration: Anja Spang)

About the ERC Synergy Grant

The European Research Council (ERC) funds research that pushes the boundaries of knowledge. Its Synergy Grants support groups of two to four researchers who combine their expertise to tackle ambitious research questions together. This grant has been selected for funding by the European Research Council (ERC) within the competitive Synergy scheme and will be integrated within a six-year time frame.