PEP is a large-scale interdisciplinary, and collaborative research project, involving six Canadian universities in five provinces. It is financed by Genome-Canada and managed by Genome-Atlantic and Génome Québec. PEP aims at the exploration of the diversity of eukaryotic genomes in a systematic, comprehensive and integrated way. The focus is on unicellular microbial eukaryotes, known as protists. Protistan eukaryotes comprise more than a dozen major lineages that, together, encompass more evolutionary, ecological and probably biochemical diversity than the multicellular kingdoms of animals, plants and fungi combined. PEP is a unique endeavor in that it is the first phylogenetically-broad genomic investigation of protists.

More details about the objectives of PEP, the complete listing of taxa studied, the PEP database, the analysis workbench AnaBench, and PEP bioinformatics tools are available.