Weekly Brief, 21 June 2021

Join the new ELIXIR EOSC Focus Group

We have set up a new ELIXIR EOSC Focus group. There will be an initial meeting this Thursday 24 June at 10:00 CEST. Learn further details and how to get involved in the 'Updates from Focus Groups' section below in this newsletter.

ELIXIR Bioinformatics Industry Forum: open software, AI and bioimaging

Wednesday, 23 June | 16:30-18:30 CEST

Join us for a panel discussion and demo on the open source imaging toolkit, Medical Open Network for AI (project MONAI). This will cover the basic workflow of developing within containers and show users how containerised applications can be used with common schedulers.
Event details and registration

All Hands 2021 news release

This year, we turned the constraint of lockdowns and a ban on international travel to our advantage by welcoming a larger and more global audience to the event, resulting in our largest ever community event to date.
Read the highlights from All Hands 2021

Final chance for Plant Community co-lead nominations

Deadline Sunday, 27 June

Full details in 'Updates from Communities' section below.

Recommended reads of the week

CoGAT: a tool for the functional annotation of SARS-CoV-2 genomes

An ELIXIR-IT and ELIXIR-CONVERGE paper
Here, we present CorGAT, a novel tool for the functional annotation of SARS-CoV-2 genomic variants. By comparisons with other state of the art methods we demonstrate that, by providing a more comprehensive and rich annotation, our method can facilitate the identification of evolutionary patterns in the genome of SARS-CoV-2.

Continue reading...

CorkOakDBThe Cork Oak Genome Database Portal

An ELIXIR Portugal and ELIXIR-EXCELERATE paper

Quercus suber (cork oak) is an evergreen tree native to the Mediterranean basin, which plays a key role in the ecology and economy of this area. The CorkOakDB is supported by the BioData.pt e-infrastructure, the Portuguese ELIXIR node for biological data. The portal gives public access to search and explore the curated genomic and transcriptomic data on this species.
Continue reading...

Updates from Focus Groups

New EOSC Focus Group

Kick-off meeting: 24 June | 10:00 CEST | Virtual
The European Open Science Cloud (EOSC) Association last week announced the draft Charters for new Task Forces. Many individual institutions within ELIXIR have already become members of the EOSC Association. An Open Call for individual membership of the Association Task Forces will be announced shortly and is expected to be open for up to a month. We hope that many of you will consider putting yourselves forward to a group of interest. In parallel, in order to coordinate ELIXIR activities around EOSC we have established a new ELIXIR Focus Group and recently held a mini symposium at the All Hands 2021 Meeting to review our strategy.

Please sign up to the new mailing list for the Focus Group; we will hold an initial meeting this Thursday 24 June at 10.00 CEST. Joining details will be provided by the EOSC mailing list and via Platform and slack communication channels ahead of the meeting. For questions and further information please contact Compute Platform lead, Jonathan Tedds (jonathan.tedds@elixir-europe.org).

Find out more

Health Data Focus Group
24 June | 15:00 CEST

The Health Data Focus Group has a meeting this Thursday and Ulrich Sax (Professor of Medical informatics, University of Gttingen) will present an overview on the recent i2b2 and tranSMART developments.

Connection details and agenda

Updates from Communities

Call for new co-lead of the Plant Community

Deadline 27 June

Astrid Junker (ELIXIR-DE) recently stood down as a co-lead of the ELIXIR Plant Community. We would like to thank Astrid for her time, enthusiasm, and hard work during her time as co-lead. Currently Sebastian Beier (ELIXIR-DE) is covering her in an interim manner.

We are opening up a period for self-nomination for the third co-lead position. Candidates should submit a short statement of their background and what they believe they will bring to the role.

Submit nominations to katharina.heil@elixir-europe.org Updates from Nodes

Presentations from the BioSB 2021 Conference

At the annual BioSB conference two sessions dedicated to ELIXIR-NL took place:

  • ELIXIR-NL Communities
  • ELIXIR-NL Inspirations

Find links to all the presentations

Join the next DTL Data Stewards Interest Group

29 June | 13:15 - 15:00 CEST

Join the next DTL Data Stewards Interest Group (DSIG) meeting: topics include local examples of data stewardship implementation and data curation. The DSIG also has a vibrant slack community to broadcast events and materials, share experiences and help solve data stewardship questions.

Agenda and registration 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. A link off to the TeSS portal

Europe PMC Webinar Preprints 101 for authors

21 June | 15:00 CEST | Virtual

ELIXIR-CZ Friday Coffee: PrankWeb: 3D ligand binding sites

25 June | 09:30 CEST | Virtual

ELIXIR Events and Conferences

ELIXIR Bioinformatics Industry Forum: Using open software tools and AI to improve bioimaging

23 June 2021 | 16:30-18:30 CEST | Virtual
3D Bioinfo webinar series: #1 FAIR Infrastructure for protein structural and functional annotations

29 June 2021 | 15:00 CEST

ELIXIR Webinar: BRENDA: the comprehensive enzyme information system

1 July 2021 | 16:00 CEST

Innovation and SME Forum: Building the learning ecosystem of health: from data tracking to preventive medicine

13 September 2021 | At the [BC]2 Conference, Basel, Switzerland
(virtual participation also available)

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

Data Manager (80%-100%)

SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics

Data Manager - Data Services and Infrastructure Support

Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS)