AIRE

The team "Adaptation, Integration, Reticulation and Evolution" studies evolution, and develops new methods of tree forests and evolutionary networks to represent, characterize and analyze evolutionary processes in prokaryotes, eukaryotes and moving elements. Our works are inspired by some simple ideas:

• The study of the single genetic content of microbial chromosomes is not sufficient to study all of the natural genetic diversity. Much, if not most, of genetic diversity is carried by mobile genetic elements, in permanent transit between cells;
• DNA molecules are exchanged and transformed through interactions between partners that are not necessarily related but belong to a larger genetic community;
• Genetic chimeras are particularly numerous in nature because of lateral exchanges that add to the process of vertical inheritance and replication.
• The inclusion of as much environmental data (metagenomic) and mobile element sequences (phage, plasmids) as possible in evolutionary analyzes is essential to complement traditional phylogenetic and phylogenetic approaches, and to delve deeper into some of them.