Around 1,500 delegates gathered on 10-14 July in Dublin for the ISMB/ECCB 2015 conference, this year's largest and most important meetings in bioinformatics and computational biology. The conferences provided a forum for disseminating the latest developments in the field and brought together scientists from computer science, molecular biology, mathematics, statistics and related areas.
ELIXIR booth in the exhibition area presented the full spectrum of its activities. In addition, ELIXIR training activities and the ELIXIR Data Service Registry were presented in the conference poster sessions.
 |  | Left: Rita Hendricusdottir, the ELIXIR training coordinator, presenting the poster on ELIXIR Trainig Coordinators Group. Right: Panel discussion during the special session on ELIXIR - BD2K collaboration. |
ELIXIR also co-hosted a special session with the US National Institute of Health's Big Data to Knowledge initiative (NIH BD2K) to explore possible collaboration between Europe and USA in bioinformatics. Niklas Blomberg, the ELIXIR Director, and his counterpart Philip Bourne from BD2K first gave an overview of their respective organisations and programmes, the following panel discussion focused on how and in which areas the US and European bioinformatics communities could collaborate.
The discussions showed that there is an interest among the respective communities in the US, Europe and elsewhere to join forces in supporting bioinformatics training at a global level. The Joint Training strategy developed by ELIXIR and GOBLET (Global Organisation for Bioinformatics Learning, Education and Training) can be seen as the first result in this effort.