Weekly Brief, 20 September 2021

This week's highlights

A new Biocuration Focus Group at ELIXIR

ELIXIR has launched the Biocuration Focus Group with the collaboration from the International Society for Biocuration (ISB). This Focus Group will provide the supporting mechanism to drive the scientific theme in the ELIXIR Scientific Programme, and widen the applicability of ELIXIR activities to data resource developers/operators across the Nodes. This Focus Group is open to the public and everyone at ELIXIR.

Please help us choose a date for the kick-off meeting by filling out this doodle poll

Find out more about the Focus Group and sign up for the mailing list

Don't miss this week's webinar from the 3D Bioinfo Community

Tomorrow - 21 September 2021 | 15:00 CEST

Join us for the second webinar in the 3DBioinfo Community's series. Includes speakers from VIB (Belgium), Fox Chase Cancer Centre (USA) and Weizmann Institute (Israel).

Full details and registration

Recommended reads of the week

BioContainers Registry: Searching Bioinformatics and Proteomics Tools, Packages, and Containers

An ELIXIR-EXCELERATE funded paper
BioContainers is an open-source project that aims to create, store, and distribute bioinformatics software containers and packages. The BioContainers community has developed a set of guidelines to standardize software containers including the metadata, versions, licenses, and software dependencies. Here we introduce the BioContainers Registry and Restful API to make containerised bioinformatics tools more findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR).

Read more...

Minimal information for chemosensitivity assays (MICHA): a next-generation pipeline to enable the FAIRification of drug screening experiments

An EOSC-Life and EATRIS paper
Chemosensitivity assays are commonly used for preclinical drug discovery and clinical trial optimization. However, data from independent assays are often discordant, largely attributed to uncharacterized variation in the experimental materials and protocols. We report here the launching of Minimal Information for Chemosensitivity Assays (MICHA), accessed via https://micha-protocol.org.

Read more...

Updates from Communities

Deadline today to submit nominations to co-lead the new Food and Nutrition Community

Deadline: Today! We're looking for two co-leads to join Jildau Bouwman (ELIXIR-NL) to lead this Community. The Community is opening a self-nomination system: candidates should submit a short statement of their background and what they believe they will bring to the role.

For any questions or to submit nominations, message Katharina Heil

Updates from Nodes

New automated workflow reuses and enriches data from ENA into GBIF

Building on a successful collaboration between ELIXIR, EMBL-EBI and GBIF that improved connections between metagenomics and species occurrence data, the ENA and GBIF have collaborated further to develop a new pipeline.

This automated process enables GBIF to reuse, translate and consolidate existing data from the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration (INSDC) directly from two of ENA's APIs. This enables GBIF to link DNA-derived records with voucher specimens and therefore making both datasets more valuable.

Read more

Read the latest IFB newsletter

The IFB have just released their latest newsletter - take a look to find out about their major projects ABRomics and EMERGEN, international initiatives, job opportunities and much more.

Read the newsletter

Updates from other initiatives

Join the GA4GH 9th Plenary Meeting

28 - 29 September 2021 | Virtual

As an open, free, and virtual event, this meeting aims to convene the global genomics and health community to advance genomic and related health data sharing across technical, ethical, and regulatory bounds. The meeting will occur over the course of two daily time blocks convenient to different time zones to encourage broad participation. All talks will be available online after the meeting.

Register for 9th Plenary here

For those unfamiliar with the work of GA4GH they are also hosting a webinar GA4GH 101 on 21 September
Register for GA4GH 101 Webinar

Join the PhasAGE International Conference

12 - 14 October 2021 | Virtual

The Phase Transitions in Ageing and Age-Related Disorders (PhasAGE) project are hosting an international conference to showcase achievements in the field of liquid-liquid phase separation in ageing and late-onset diseases. Registration deadline 1 October, registration fee waiver available for early career researchers with selected abstracts.

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 the TeSS portal.

3D-Bioinfo Community Webinar: Open resources for sharing, integrating and benchmarking software tools for modelling the Interactive in 3D
21 September 2021 | 15:00 CEST

SIB & ELIXIR-CONVERGE workshop: Research Data Management and Data Management Plan
28 - 29 October 2021 | Lausanne, Switzerland

de.NBI: 3rd metaRbolomics Hackathon
22 - 24 November 2021 | Lutherstadt, Germany

de.NBI: LIFS Training Session at ILS2021 & Lipidomics Forum 2021
5 October 2021 | Regensburg, Germany

SIB: Reproducible research and data analysis using Nextflow pipelines
15-18 November 2021 | Virtual

ELIXIR Events and Conferences

BioHackathon Europe 2021

8-12 November 2021 | Hybrid Barcelona, Spain

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

Senior Engineer, Bioinformatics Service

Oslo University Hospital / ELIXIR Norway

Temporary outreach programme support at INB/ELIXIR-ES coordination node

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS)

Application Development and Deployment Engineer

IFB-core

(Senior) Data Steward / Research and Development specialist

ELIXIR-Luxembourg / Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine

Data Steward / Research and Development specialist

ELIXIR-Luxembourg / Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine