​Yves Van de Peer leads the Bioinformatics and Evolutionary Genomics (BEG) Division. The BEG division is a center of excellence in the field of gene and genome annotation and in the field of comparative and evolutionary genomics.

Nowadays, BEG is considered a genome analysis powerhouse specialized in the study of the structure and evolution of plant genomes. Because of our unique expertise and experience in gene prediction, genome annotation, and genome analysis, our research group has been, and still is, involved in many international genome projects and works closely together with international genome sequencing centers such as the DOE Joint Genome Institute (USA), Genoscope (France), and BGI (China). In the past years, BEG has been heavily involved in analyzing and studying the genomes of the poplar tree, grape, apple, tomato, potato, Arabodopsis lyrata, Eucalyptus grandis, Medicago, the orchids Phalaenopsis equestris and Dendrobium catenatum, the sea grass Zostera marina, several green and brown algae, several fungi that are associated with plants, and different kinds of mites and other arthropods that are pests to plants. In total, our contribution to these important genome projects describing analyses of complete genomes that serve a very wide community of scientists has already led to more than 25 highly cited papers in the highest impact journals such as PNAS, Nature, Nature Genetics, and Science.