About STRiVE

About us

STRiVE is a Special Topic Network funded since 2025 by the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. This program aims to complement the ESEB congress by building links across the community of evolutionary biology, focused on a timely research field.

Our STN is a global community of evolutionary biologists, genomicists, theoreticians, and experimental researchers aiming to address the evolutionary role of structural genomic variation. The network brings together a diverse range of expertise, including population genomics, ecology, chromosome biology, cytogenetics, bioinformatics, and evolutionary theory, fostering exchange across disciplines. Our community spans continents, study systems, and evolutionary scales—from within-population variation to macroevolutionary phylogenetic divergence—across animals, plants, fungi, and other eukaryotes. Through meetings, collaborative research, training activities, and shared resources, the network provides a platform to develop concepts, methods, and people needed to advance structural variant research in evolutionary biology.

Why STRiVE?

Structural variants—such as inversions, duplications, transposable elements, and chromosomal rearrangements—are now recognised as major drivers of genome evolution, adaptation, and potentially speciation. Yet research on structural variants remains fragmented: different variant types are often studied in isolation, across separate disciplines, organisms, and analytical traditions. As a result, we still lack a coherent evolutionary framework linking genome architecture to evolutionary outcomes. This network aims to resolve this fragmentation.

By connecting researchers working on diverse classes of structural variants and across a wide range of taxa, the STRiVE ESEB Special Topic Network aims to identify general principles governing how structural genomic variation originates, persists, and shapes biodiversity across the Tree of Life.

Our objectives

Our network pursues three tightly linked objectives:

1. Build conceptual bridges across structural variant research: We connect researchers studying different classes of structural variants and systems to move beyond isolated case studies, integrate theory and data, and clarify how genome architecture itself evolves and feeds back on adaptation and diversification.
2. Enable comparative and meta-analytic structural variant research across species: By developing and sharing standardised, open pipelines, we aim to make cross-species analyses of structural variation feasible, allowing robust inference of general evolutionary patterns across populations and taxa.
3. Develop methods and train the next generation: We focus strongly on early-career researchers, providing training in both cutting-edge genomic methods (e.g. pangenomes, phased assemblies) and evolutionary interpretation, ensuring structural variant research remains accessible rather than technically exclusive.