Pléiade, a new project team at the interface between biology, IT and mathematics geared towards biodiversity and biotechnology
Date:
Changed on 23/11/2023
Early March saw the arrival at the Inria Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest research centre of a new project team, Pléiade, a joint undertaking involving Inria, the INRA and the CNRS. Linking biology, IT and mathematics, Pléiade, run by David Sherman, is the first team within the centre to be set up in partnership with the INRA.
A complementary trio to drive this new team forward
Pléiade was created as a result of an encounter between David Sherman, an Inria IT specialist, Pascal Durrens, a biologist working at the CNRS and Alain Franc, a mathematician at the INRA. Having three researchers from three different employers and three different scientific fields, with three different academic backgrounds, is what makes the team so complementarity and what gives it its added value.
An interdisciplinary project team geared towards biodiversity and biotechnology
The genetic diversity of organisms expresses itself in a diversity of functions, which can be observed either at the cell level or at the ecosystem level. Pléiade discover patterns in genetic diversity and use these in order to build networks of interdependent functions and interacting organisms. The team develop algorithms for shape recognition and machine learning, deriving cellular and ecological process models and building software frameworks for applications in ecology, evolution and biotechnology.
Behind the name Pléiade…
Pléiade is the French name for the Seven Sisters, a constellation of stars, drawing an analogy between research into patterns in scatter plots and the search for constellations in the sky.