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
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
Postdoc positions in biocatalysis at DTU Biosustain
DTU Biosustain
Postdoc multidimensional integration of high throughput sequencing data
Albert-Ludwigs-Universitt Freiburg
Senior expert at data science excellence center in medical imaging
CMIV/AIDA/NBIS/BIGPICTURE
Postdoctoral fellow (Research Associate)
ELIXIR-Luxembourg / Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine
Scientific Full-stack Python Developer
ELIXIR-Luxembourg / Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine