Weekly Brief, 20 December 2021

This week's highlights

Seasonal update

This is the final Weekly Brief newsletter of 2021. The ELIXIR Hub will be closed for the week 27-31 December 2021. Thank you to you all for helping to make 2021 such an excellent year for ELIXIR. We hope you all have a wonderful, restful, and healthy Christmas break.

The Weekly Brief will resume on 10 January 2022, please continue to send updates for inclusion in the newsletter to info@elixir-europe.org

FAIRplus | eTOX case study: unlocking toxicology data for drug discovery

This case study analyses how the project achieved a 25% increase in FAIRness level, the hurdles faced, and the solutions applied. It focuses on two main solutions:

Chemical identifiers
Ontology mapping

Read/download/share it

Changes in Platform leadership

Four new ELIXIR Platform Leads who will be taking up their roles from 1 January 2022:

Data: Ulrike Wittig (ELIXIR-DE)
Compute: Juha Trnroos (ELIXIR-FI)
Interoperability: Susanna-Assunta Sansone (ELIXIR-UK) and Tony Burdett (EMBL-EBI)

We welcome the new additions and thank those standing down for their contributions over the years.
Read more

Recommended reads

SARS-CoV-2 sculpts the immune system to induce sustained virus-specific nave-like and memory B-cell responses

An ELIXIR-EXCELERATE & eTRANSAFE paper

SARS-CoV-2 infection induces virus-reactive memory B cells expressing unmutated antibodies, which hints at their emergence from nave B cells. Yet, the dynamics of virus-specific nave B cells and their impact on immunity and immunopathology remain unclear. We found a virus-specific antibody response with a broad spectrum of classes and subclasses during acute infection, which evolved into an IgG1-dominated response during convalescence. Acute infection was associated with increased mature B-cell progenitors in the circulation and the unexpected expansion of virus-targeting nave-like B cells.
Read more...

Benchmarks for interpretation of QSAR models

An ELIXIR Czech Republic paper

Interpretation of QSAR models is useful to understand the complex nature of biological or physicochemical processes, guide structural optimization or perform knowledge-based validation of QSAR models. Highly predictive models are usually complex and their interpretation is non-trivial. This is particularly true for modern neural networks. Various approaches to interpretation of these models exist. However, it is difficult to evaluate and compare performance and applicability of these ever-emerging methods. Herein, we developed several benchmark data sets with end-points determined by pre-defined patterns.
Read more...

Updates from Platforms

TeSS presented at the Open Science FAIR

During the Open Science FAIR in September 2021, ELIXIR Training presented TeSS during the workshop 'The RDM training and support catalogue landscape'.
View the recording below or read more in this blog

Updates from Nodes

Read the December edition of the IFB newsletter

This month, there is an editorial on the French ABRomics project, lots of information and feedback from national and international events and projects, and above all, many job opportunities,
Read the newsletter

Updates from other initiatives

Join and share the mentoring programme for open life science ambassadors

Application deadline 15 January 2022

Open Life Science is a 16-week mentoring and training program that upskills individuals in open and reproducible research and empowers them to become open science ambassadors in their communities. The next cohort will take place from February to June 2022. Grants available.
Find out more

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-CH: Immunoinformatics

25-26 January 2022 | Muttenz, Switzerland

ELIXIR Events and Conferences

Getting started with impact evaluation

21 January 2022 | 10:00 CET

ELIXIR-CONVERGE SIB workshop: Research Data Management and Data Management Plan

27-28 January 2022| Lausanne, Switzerland

ELIXIR All Hands meeting 2022

7-10 June 2022 | Amsterdam, Netherlands

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

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