Background

Earth Metabolome Initiative

The Earth Metabolom Initivative is a large scale open science project whose aime is to catalogue the metabolome of all organisms currently known on the planet Earth. Ultimaly, this will create a library accessible to all, enabling targeted research and protection of certain organisms and metabolomites. These data will enable us to observe the chemodiversity of specific locations and thus add chemical arguments to environmental protection.

Digital Botanical Garden Initiative

The digital botanical garden Initiative (DBGI) is a pilot project whose aim is to extract, catalogue, analyze and create a digital library of metabolomic data from plants found in botanical gardens. This enables the methods to be tested and the bioinformatics resources needed for data processing to be created.

Why Botanical gardens ?

Botanical gardens, although human-made, are hotspots of biodiversity and the ideal place to test harvesting, extraction and analysis methods. They display a considerable number of plants in a small, accessible area. Botanical gardens provide an initial approach and the methods needed to eventually collect different organisms from wild ecosystems (see Earth Metabolome Initiative). Their biodiversity also makes it possible to set up a library of chemical extracts, enabling the development of the IT tools needed to analyze these data.

Fribourg Botanical Garden

Fribourg is privileged to have a university botanical garden where over 5,000 species are cultivated and conserved. This represents one of the largest systemic collections in Switzerland. The botanical garden and its research group play an active role in the conservation of rare and endangered species at cantonal and national level.