This week's highlights
Second edition of ELIXIR leadership programme for women
ELIXIR has launched the second edition of a leadership programme for women: ELEAD 2 (ELIXIR LEadership And Diversity mentoring programme). The programme helps to address the underrepresentation of women in leadership roles in STEM by building leadership confidence, enhancing career progression and fostering a more inclusive research environment.
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Expression of interest for the second edition of ELEAD closing soon
Deadline: 28 February 2025
ELEAD seeks to support women's leadership growth in ELIXIR by providing structured mentorship, peer support and professional training. Submit an expression of interest to get involved in the second edition of the ELEAD programme.
More information
Recommended reads
The PRIDE database at 20 years: 2025 update
A Core Data Resource paper
The PRoteomics IDEntifications (PRIDE) database is the worlds leading mass spectrometry (MS)-based proteomics data repository and one of the founding members of the ProteomeXchange consortium. This manuscript summarises the developments in PRIDE resources and related tools for the last three years. Additionally, the authors will highlight novel activities such as the availability of the PRIDE chatbot and their work to improve support for MS crosslinking datasets. Furthermore, the authors will describe how they have increased the efforts to reuse, reanalyse and disseminate high-quality proteomics data into added-value resources such as UniProt, Ensembl and Expression Atlas.
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blast2galaxy: a CLI and Python API for BLAST+ and DIAMOND searches on Galaxy servers
An ELIXIR Germany paper
blast2galaxy is a Python package that uses the Galaxy API to run sequence alignments with NCBI BLAST+ and DIAMOND as Galaxy-wrapped tools on compatible servers. It includes a command-line interface that mirrors the CLI of BLAST+ and DIAMOND and a high-level Python API for direct alignments from Python applications. The package relies on bioblend for communication with the Galaxy API. blast2galaxy is available as open-source software under the MIT license. The source code is available on Github. It can be installed from the Python Package Index using pip install blast2galaxy or from the Bioconda channel using conda install -c bioconda blast2galaxy.
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Updates from Nodes
Magnus Palmblad appointed co-Head of Node for Health Sciences at ELIXIR Netherlands
ELIXIR Netherlands has appointed Magnus Palmblad as co-Head of Node for the Health Sciences domain. Magnus is an Associate Professor and Bioinformatics Group Leader at Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC), specialising in AI-driven computational proteomics and mass spectrometry data analysis. As co-Head of Node, Magnus aims to strengthen ELIXIR-NLs role in promoting FAIR research, supporting early-career scientists, and bridging health and green life sciences.
First HDR UK and ELIXIR-UK Joint Hackathon:
A resounding success!
ELIXIR-UK recently hosted the first HDR UK & ELIXIR-UK Joint Hackathon in Nottingham, and it was a huge success. With 50 attendees and a waiting list just as long, participation exceeded expectations. Feedback has been positive, and the Node is already exploring plans for next years hackathon.
Interested in joining future hackathons? Participations outside the UK Node are also welcomed. Get in touch at community@elixiruknode.org
Updates from Communities
Register for the 3D BioInfo Community meeting
19-21 March 2025 | Barcelona, Spain
Registration deadline: 1 March 2025
The 3D-BioInfo Community meeting will take place in March 2025 as part of a joint event with 3DSIG COSI from ISCB. The meeting aims to bring together structural bioinformatics researchers from two communities for networking and to exchange ideas on the workflows and resources needed to exploit the transformative new developments in the data and methods.
More information and registration
Updates from other initiatives
Two videos demonstrate GDI technical infrastructure
The European Genomic Data Infrastructure project has released two videos demonstrating the 1+Million Genomes technical infrastructure using real-like synthetic data distributed across six European countries.
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Watch the videos
Clinical Genomics Laboratory Community meeting
10 March 2025 | Online
Hosted by GA4GH and ClinGen, the Clinical Genomics Laboratory Community (CGLC) aims to connect clinical labs around the globe to foster collaboration, knowledge exchange and standards development. In this meeting, the community will discuss the draft ACMG/AMP/CAP/ClinGen Sequence Variant Classification (SVC) v4.0 standards. Participants will have the opportunity to learn about the standards, get involved in a pilot programme and provide feedback.
Learn more and register
PathOS impact training: Exploring the economic impact on Open Science
28 March 2025 | Online
As the bioinformatics case study in the PathOS project, ELIXIR will contribute to the training webinar on the economic impact on Open Science. The training webinar will delve into how Open Science fosters economic growth and innovation, particularly within the life sciences sector.
More information
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
de.NBI course: Awareness in data management and analysis for industry and research
6 - 7 March 2025 | Online
ELIXIR Estonia: Data visualisation (theory)
20 March 2025 | Online
EMBL-EBI course: Data science for life scientists
16 - 20 June 2025 | EMBL-EBI, UK
EMBL-EBI course: Data visualisation for biology
24 - 26 June 2025 | EMBL-EBI, UK
EMBL-EBI course: Systems biology: from large datasets to biological insight
7 - 11 July 2025 | EMBL-EBI, UK
ELIXIR Events and Conferences
ELIXIR 3D BioInfo Community F2F/hybrid meeting
19 - 21 March 2025 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain
Compute Platform in person meeting (2025)
25 - 26 March 2025 | Munich, Germany
Training Platform F2F/hybrid meeting (2025)
27 - 28 March 2025 | Munich, Germany
ELIXIR Microbiome Community F2F/hybrid meeting
09 - 10 April 2025 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain
ELIXIR Biodiversity Community F2F/hybrid meeting
10 - 11 April 2025 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain
ELIXIR All Hands 2025
2 - 5 June 2025 | Thessaloniki, Greece
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