Great UniEuk Kick-Off meeting in Paris

UniEuk: A Universal taxonomic framework and integrated reference gene databases for Eukaryotic biology, ecology, and evolution.

The UniEuk project was Kicked-Off this week in Paris in the beautiful Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle. 

Funded by the Moore Foundation, UniEuk is a community-based project to unify the taxonomy of unicellular Eukaryotes (protists) and achieve a morpho-genetic reference system for eukaryotic biology, ecology and evolution, including two components:

First, a standardized curation process based on the EukRef initiative and realized predominantly by PhD students and post-docs will generate phylogenetically-informed reference databases of genetic markers with reference alignments and trees.

Second, the generated knowledge will be structured into a universal eukaryotic taxonomic framework, integrating information from relevant genetic markers and classical morphology-based data, and validated by a comprehensive network of taxonomy experts.

The SILVA Team has a central say in UniEuk by Pelin Yilmaz being the Co-director.

We are sure that the project will help us in improving the Eukaryotic part of SILVA significantly.

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