image: From left to right: Prof. Tom A. Williams, Prof. Anja Spang (Corresponding PI), Prof. Gergely János Szöllősi, and Dr. Bastien Boussau.
Credit: Gergely János Szöllősi
An international collaborative research project involving Professor Gergely János Szöllősi of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) has been selected for a 2026 Synergy Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) This is the first time an OIST researcher has received ERC funding.
The ERC supports frontier research on the basis of scientific excellence under Horizon Europe, the European Union's (EU) framework program for research and innovation. Synergy Grants are the ERC's large-scale grants for groups of two to four Principal Investigators (PIs) who bring together complementary skills and resources to jointly tackle ambitious research problems that cannot be addressed by individual researchers or teams working alone. Each grant provides up to 10 million euros over six years. ERC-funded research is, in principle, carried out at host institutions in EU Member States or Associated Countries, but Synergy Grants allow one PI per team to participate while based at an institution outside Europe. This arrangement has made it possible to conduct ERC-funded research at OIST in Japan. In the 2026 call, the ERC received a total 957 applications, of which 48 were selected for funding. With approximately €500 million in total funding to be awarded, the program is highly competitive, with a success rate of around 5%.
INTREEG (Integrating interactions into phylogenetics to reconstruct genome and biosphere evolution), the project in which Prof. Szöllősi is involved, explores how far back in time the history of life can be reconstructed from the genomes of living organisms. It also aims to reveal the genomes and metabolic capabilities of microbes that existed throughout this long evolutionary history, as well as the environments in which they lived.
Prof. Szöllősi explains, "The genomes of living organisms are a record of the history of life, but today we can read it back only as far as LUCA, the last universal common ancestor, over four billion years ago. The models that get us there are tractable only because they assume that sites in a protein, genes in a genome and species in a community evolve independently, which they do not. Interactions are not just biology we leave out; they are information we leave untapped. With hundreds of thousands of genomes, along with machine learning, we can finally extract patterns of interactions from the data. The question is how much further back they let us see, and whether we also reconstruct the so-called “ghost lineages” that left no descendants, but whose genes survive within other lineages. The OIST team will build these methods, as well as the software and data infrastructure that the four groups will share."
The project is a collaboration among the following four PIs:
- Professor Anja Spang (Corresponding PI), Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ)
- Professor Tom A. Williams, University of Bath, UK
- Dr. Bastien Boussau, Laboratory of Biometry and Evolutionary Biology (LBBE), French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS)
- Associate Professor Gergely János Szöllősi, Model-Based Evolutionary Genomics Unit, Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST)