Weekly Brief, 14 November 2022

This week's highlights

Successful BioHackathon Europe 2022!

Last week, we held the 5th BioHackathon Europe in Paris, France.
The event attracted more than 170 on-site and 130 virtual participants from across the world to work on 35 life science projects. It was a successful hybrid event with lots of fruitful outcomes! Stay tuned to find out more about the event in our upcoming news release.

ELIXIR: connecting biodiversity infrastructures and resources

Scientists and the public increasingly recognise global biodiversity threats as a critical challenge. F1000Research blog post by Jerry Lanfear from ELIXIR Hub and Robert Waterhouse from Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (ELIXIR-CH) highlights how ELIXIR works to improve the integration of molecular data into biodiversity infrastructure.

Read the blog post

News release: 3rd EBIF focus on machine learning in life sciences

In October, ELIXIR held the third ELIXIR Bioinformatics Industry Forum (EBIF) in a hybrid format. The event brought together bioinformaticians from academia and industry to discuss visionary ideas in making machine learning robust and reproducible for life sciences.



Read the news

New IAC member

We're pleased to announce that the ELIXIR Board appointed Brnice Wulbrecht to the ELIXIR Industry Advisory Committee. Brnice joins us from ONTOFORCE and is specialised in the areas of Plant Sciences, Pharma, Biotechnology and -omics sciences.

Recommended reads

Secondary Structures of Proteins Follow Menzerath-Altmann Law

An ELIXIR-CZ paper

This article examines the presence of the empirical tendency known as the MenzerathAltmann Law (MAL) on protein secondary structures. MAL is related to optimization principles observed in natural languages and in genetic information on chromosomes or protein domains. The authors conclude that the lengths of secondary structures are specifically dependent on their number inside the protein sequence, while possibly reflecting the formula proposed in this paper. This behavior is observed on average but is individually avoidable and possibly driven by a latent cost function. The data suggest that MAL could provide a useful guiding principle in protein design.

Read more

Estimating cell type-specific differential expression using deconvolution

An ELIXIR-FI paper

When differentially expressed genes are detected from samples containing different types of cells, only a very coarse overview without any cell type-specific information is obtained. Although several computational methods have been published to estimate cell type-specific differentially expressed genes from bulk samples, their performance has not been evaluated outside the original publications. Here, the authors compare the accuracies of nine of these methods, test their sensitivity to various factors often present in real studies and provide practical guidelines for end users about when reliable results can be expected and when not.

Read more

Updates from Nodes

ELIXIR-UK participated in the International Funders Future of Research Software workshop

The International Funders Future of Research Software workshop was held in Amsterdam on 8-9 November 2022 aiming to set the future agenda for national and international funders to support sustainable research software. Carole Goble, the ELIXIR-UK Joint Head of Node, gave an invited keynote to set the scene for the workshop.

See the slides for the talk

Updates from Platforms

Reminder: last chance to register for the ELIXIR Data-Interoperability Platforms hybrid/F2F event

The final deadline to register for the ELIXIR Data-Interoperability Platforms hybrid/F2F event taking place on the 28-30 November 2022 is fast approaching. Please register before Friday 18 November 2022.

More details and registration

EMBL is hiring a Bioinformatics Training Project Manager

EMBL is looking for a team member who will coordinate a new multi-organisation project, BioNT, funded by the European Commission, embedded in the Data Science Centre, alongside Bio-IT, and in synergy with EMBLs long-term scientific and outreach programme.

More information

Updates from Communities

The Freiburg Galaxy Team is looking for a Bioinformatics training officer

Are you interested in training in life sciences? Join the Freiburg Galaxy team to develop, coordinate and implement training programs within international communities, especially via BioNT, a new multi-organisation project funded by the European Commission, and via the Galaxy Training Network (GTN).

More information

Updates from Other Initiatives

EOSC4Cancer website launched

The EOSC4Cancer project has recently launched the project website. Check the project website to learn about its work towards a European-wide foundation to accelerate data-driven cancer research.

Check the website

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 Events and Conferences

Data-Interoperability Platforms Hybrid F2F 2022
28-30 November 2022 | Geneva, Switzerland

ELIXIR Single Cell Omics Community F2F/hybrid Meeting
5&6 December 2022 | Hybrid - Stockholm, Sweden

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
 

OpenEBench Web Front-end Developer

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), part of INB/ELIXIR-ES

Data engineer

Radboud university medical center

Technical Coordinator

SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

Project Manager Human Genomics Data

VIB

Software Developer

VIB