This week's highlights
Launch of ELIXIR-STEERS - enhancing research software management in life science
ELIXIR announced the start of the EU-funded ELIXIR-STEERS project, a three-year initiative with a budget of 4M. The project is a collaboration between all ELIXIR Nodes, encompassing 36 institutes across 23 countries, plus EMBL-EBI. It aims to enhance large-scale, cross-border federated analysis in the life sciences throughout the European Research Area.
Read the news
Eight new projects funeded by ELIXIR
ELIXIR has launched eight projects addressing the scientific and technological ambitions of its new Scientific Programme for 2024 to 2028. Further projects covering the Programmes Node and people development objectives will be launched later this year.
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Highlight video of BioHackathon 2023
BioHackathon 2023 was a big success with over 350 bioinfomaticians hacking through 35 projects. The highlight video of last years BioHackathon is now on ELIXIRs YouTube channel.
Biohackathon 2024 will be held on 4-8 November 2024. The Call for projects will be open at the end of February, details will be announced on the website and through the Weekly Brief.
Watch the highlight video
Recommended reads
MetaboLights: open data repository for metabolomics
An ELIXIR Food and Nutrition Community paper
MetaboLights is a global database for metabolomics studies including the raw experimental data and the associated metadata. The database is cross-species and cross-technique and covers metabolite structures and their reference spectra as well as their biological roles and locations where available. MetaboLights is the recommended metabolomics repository for a number of leading journals and ELIXIR, the European infrastructure for life science information. In this article, the authors describe the continued growth and diversity of submissions and the significant developments in recent years.
Read more
Transformer-based tool recommendation system in Galaxy
A Galaxy paper
Galaxy is a web-based open-source platform for scientific analyses. Researchers use thousands of high-quality tools and workflows for their respective analyses in Galaxy. Tool recommender system predicts a collection of tools that can be used to extend an analysis. In this work, a tool recommender system is developed by training a transformer on workflows available on Galaxy Europe and its performance is compared to other neural networks such as recurrent, convolutional and dense neural networks.
Updates from Nodes
Summer school in bioinformatics
Application deadline: 25 February 2024
17 - 21 June 2024
This course provides an introduction to the use of bioinformatics in biological research, giving you guidance for using bioinformatics in your work whilst also providing hands-on training in tools and resources appropriate to your research.
More information and registration
Improving breast cancer treatment prognoses with liquid biopsy
Cancer cell DNA can be isolated from a breast cancer patients blood sample, and the degree of fragmentation of the DNA can be assessed to determine whether the patient has a poor or good prognosis for treatment. The amount of data in this study is so huge that it requires the supercomputing capacity of the Finnish ELIXIR Node of the CSC IT Center for Science.
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ELIXIR-UK and BioFAIR featuring at the Festival of Genomics 2024
At the 2024 Festival of Genomics in London, ELIXIR-UKs two Joint Heads of Node, Carole Goble and Neil Hall, attended the event putting BioFAIR and the UK Node at the centre stage. Their presentations revealed the relentless work of a community in diverse fields.
Updates from other initiatives
Survey: Training needs for digital skills in Life Sciences
ELIXIR funded a three-day workshop between ELIXIR members and the BioNT, the Bio Network for Training, to work on guidelines for delivering industry targeted training in life sciences. The project is conducting a survey to better understand industry needs for training in digital skills for Life Sciences.
WorkflowHub - SOPs workshop
9 February 2024 | 14:00 - 16:00 CET | Online
The workshop will provide guidance on how to use WorkflowHub to organise, share and publish their SOPs, as well as hosting short presentations to describe SOPs usage and hosting resources, and discuss metadata requirements for SOPs in Biodiversity.
More information 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. For more, visit TeSS portal
de.NBI: Maximizing the Potential of Agricultural Research Data: A Guide to Crafting an Effective Data Management Plan
15 February 2024 | Online
SIB course: NGS - Genome Variant Analysis
26-27 February 2024 | Bern, Switzerland
SIB course: Enrichment Analysis
11 March 2024 | Online
de.NBI Spring School 2024 - Bioinformatics for Microbial Omics
18-22 March | Bielefeld, Germany
EMBL-EBI: Microscopy data analysis: machine learning and the BioImage Archive
22-26 April 2024 | Online
ELIXIR Events and Conferences
Training Platform and Coordinators Triangle co-located event
4-6 March 2024 | Prague, Czech Republic
ELIXIR All Hands 2024
10-12 June 2024 | Uppsala, Sweden
ECCB 2024
16-20 September 2024 | Turku, Finland
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
Web Front-end Developer (RE2)
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), coordinators of INB/ELIXIR-ES
Senior Research Engineer on Research Infrastructures for Precision Medicine projects (RE3)
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC), coordinators of INB/ELIXIR-ES
Executive Assistant to the ELIXIR Director
ELIXIR Hub