This week's highlights
Story collection shows interoperability successes
A set of seven stories has been created to demonstrate how biodata and software can be made more interoperable. The stories describe successful data reuse across the ELIXIR network, exploring how to achieve impact through interoperable data sharing.
Read the news
Summary report of the January Industry Advisory Committee meeting
The annual ELIXIR Industry Advisory Committee (IAC) took place in Hinxton on 22 January 2025. We would hereby like to share with you the Summary Report from the meeting including the IAC's feedback on presented ELIXIR activities. For any questions about the meeting or the IAC, please contact Jo Wingender or Despoina Sousoni.
Read the report
Recommended reads
kMetaShot: a fast and reliable taxonomy classifier for metagenome-assembled genomes
An ELIXIR Italy paper
With the aim of deploying an effective tool for fast and reliable metagenome-assembled genomes taxonomic classification, the authors presented kMetaShot, a taxonomy classifier based on k-mer/minimizer counting. The researchers benchmarked kMetaShot against CAMITAX and GTDBtk by using both in silico and real mock communities and demonstrated how, while implementing a fast and concise algorithm, it outperforms the other tools in terms of classification accuracy. Additionally, kMetaShot is an easy-to-install and easy-to-use bioinformatic tool that is also suitable for researchers with few command-line skills.
Read more
Transition to piscivory seen through brain transcriptomics in a juvenile percid fish
An ELIXIR Czech Republic paper
This paper compared brain transcriptomes of both subcohorts and identified 148 differentially transcribed genes to explore molecular mechanisms accompanying the switch from planktivory to piscivory. The pathway enrichment analyses identified the piscivorous phase to be associated with genes involved in collagen and extracellular matrix generation with numerous gene ontology, while the planktivorous phase was associated with genes for non-muscle-myosins with less gene ontology terms. The authors proposed a spatiotemporal spreading of juvenile development over a longer period and larger spatial scales through developmental plasticity as an adaptation to exploiting all types of resources and decreasing the intraspecific competition.
Read more
Updates from Nodes
6th Hands-on computational enzyme design course
2 - 5 June 2025 | Brno, Czech Republic
This course will introduce user-friendly software tools for predicting and redesigning enzyme properties and will provide intensive practical training. After the course, the participants will be able to use the tools independently.
More information and registration
Genetic testing improves medication safety and effectiveness
A recently published study reveals that a quarter of patients received medications whose efficacy or safety could have been improved by considering the patients genome. The study used data from registries of the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare and biobank data.
Updates from Platforms
Data Submission survey
Deadline: 11 February 2025
The ELIXIR Data Platform WP2 team (Connecting and brokering Node contributions to ELIXIR Data resources) invites ELIXIR members to complete a Data Submission survey. The survey aims to identify the variety of roles and tasks involved in data submission, hence to better define the term Data Brokering.
Fill out the survey
Compute Platform in person meeting
25 - 26 March 2025 | Munich, Germany
Registration is now open for this year's ELIXIR Compute Platform in-person event in Munich. The event will take place over two days (lunchtime to lunchtime) on 25 and 26 March at the Hilton Munich City. This is a co-located event that includes the All ExCo and Training Platform meetings.
More information and registration
Updates from Communities
3D-BioInfo webinar: Prediction of ligands, pockets and tunnels for enzymes
18 February 2025 | 17:00 - 18:00 CET | Online
The next 3D-BioInfo webinar focuses on the topic of enzymes:
- Large-scale annotation and tunnels in cognate enzymeligand complexes
- A structure-based approach to identify non-amino acidic ligands of DDAH-1
More information and registration
ELIXIR Rare Disease Community: Call for new co-leads
Deadline: 17 March 2025
The Rare Disease Community is looking for two new co-leads to join the Community leadership team (Sergi Beltran). Candidates should submit a short statement of their background and what they believe they will bring to the role. A big thank you to Marco Roos and Ana Rath for their work as co-leads and we look forward to their ongoing strategic contribution to the Community.
For any questions or nominations, please contact Giselle Kerry or Magda Chegkazi
More information (including timeline and self-nomination details)
Updates from other initiatives
PathOS impact training
PathOS project announced the launch of the Training Corner that includes information and resources about upcoming impact related training events. As the bioinformatics case study in this project, ELIXIR will contribute to the training webinar Exploring the economic impact on Open Science on 28 March 2025.
More information
Upcoming ELIXIR events & webinars
ELIXIR Training Courses & Webinars
The ELIXIR TeSS portal has a variety of interesting events and courses organised by the ELIXIR Nodes. For more, visit TeSS portal
ELIXIR Estonia: Introduction to statistics with R
18 & 25 February 2025 | Tartu, Estonia
de.NBI course: Awareness in data management and analysis for industry and research
6 - 7 March 2025 | Online
SIB course: Single-cell transcriptomics with R
18 - 20 March 2025 | Bern, Switzerland
ELIXIR Estonia: Data visualisation (theory)
20 March 2025 | Online
EMBL-EBI course: Data science for life scientists
16 - 20 June 2025 | EMBL-EBI, UK
EMBL-EBI course: Data visualisation for biology
24 - 26 June 2025 | EMBL-EBI, UK
EMBL-EBI course: Systems biology: from large datasets to biological insight
7 - 11 July 2025 | EMBL-EBI, UK
ELIXIR Events and Conferences
ELIXIR 3D BioInfo Community F2F/hybrid meeting
19 - 21 March 2025 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain
ELIXIR Microbiome Community F2F/hybrid meeting
09 - 10 April 2025 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain
ELIXIR Biodiversity Community F2F/hybrid meeting
10 - 11 April 2025 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain
ELIXIR All Hands 2025
2 - 5 June 2025 | Thessaloniki, Greece
Job vacancies
All vacancies are also published on the ELIXIR website (also including those from industry). If you need our help communicating your new open positions, you can submit a job advertisement and it will automatically appear on our newsletters. Go to our vacancy page to submit a job