FindingPheno
Centre for Ecological Research
Budapest, Hungary
The Centre for Ecological Research is the largest ecology institute in Hungary, and therefore it is dedicated to being an advisor to the nation on issues related to biodiversity and ecosystems, and also responsible for supporting the development of ecology in Hungary. There are four institutes within the Centre, the Balaton Limnological Institute, the Danube Research Institute, the Institute of Evolution and the Institute of Ecology and Botany. These Institutes work on integrating disciplines as the solution to our environmental problems cannot be solved in isolation.
Within the Centre, the Institute of Evolution with 18 researchers is the partner of the project. They form numerous research groups working on diverse topics of evolution from the question of origin of life through the evolutionary background of cooperation and mutualism to Darwinian medicine and emerging diseases. The integrating principle among these diverse topics is the deep evolutionary view.
We regularly apply dynamical system modelling as a general method for studying a variety of evolutionary and ecological problems, including the microbial communication and microbiome dynamics. One of the current strategic aims of the institute is to enhance the interaction of the theoretical research with innovative projects such as FindingPheno.
Project Contributions
Within the framework of WP4 we work on developing analytical and agent based models to study which factors determine host microbiome interactions. The aim is to develop a series of models with increasing complexity to give theoretical background to the statistical results received from the holo-omic data available in the project. Further, based on the data analysis we can test new hypotheses about the evolution and ecological stability of host-microbiome communities by mathematical methods. Our work provides a theoretical basis to the project and will catalyse generation of new hypotheses for the host genome-microbiome-phenotype axis in any biological system.
