Weekly Brief, 8 March 2021

Submit your nominations for Platform ExCos

Firstly, we want to thank our departing ExCos for the stellar work that they have been doing with ELIXIR over the years. You will be sorely missed!

We have four open positions for ExCos:

  • Data Platform, one position
  • Compute Platform, one position
  • Interoperability Platform, two positions

Nominations must be made by a head of Node so please contact yours to make a suggestion.
Full details

Deadline for ELIXIR All-Hands workshop proposals

Please submit your workshop proposals for the ELIXIR All Hands 2021 virtual event by this Friday 12 March.
View event details and submit your proposal

Support data sharing for COVID-19: sign the open letter

Please sign the open letter to help ensure that crucial progress in research and healthcare data is being treated in a FAIR way and not unnecessarily siloed, fragmented and closed
Sign here

Recommended reads of the week

Connecting molecular sequences to their voucher specimens

Preprint from BioHackathon Europe 2020 project 33

In the Biohackathon we built a semi-automated workflow to take specimen data from the Meise Herbarium and search for references to those specimens in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA)[...] it was possible to discover and match sequences to their vouchers in our collection, we encountered many problems of data standardization, missing data and errors. [...]Therefore, we make some tentative recommendations for how this could be achieved in the future..
Continue reading...

A catalogue of 863 Rett-syndrome-causing MECP2
mutations and lessons learned from data integration

Rett syndrome (RTT) is a rare neurological disorder mostly caused by a genetic variation in MECP2. Making new MECP2 variants and the related phenotypes available provides data for better understanding of disease mechanisms. [...] by making the genotype-phenotype data more Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR) we can facilitate prioritization and analysis of variants.
Continue reading...

Updates from Nodes

Please fill out the EMBL-EBI impact survey

EMBL-EBI have launched a survey to evaluate the impact of their open data resources. If open data ever saved you 15 minutes please take the time to fill it in before the 31 March.
Fill in the survey

Tool to predict COVID severity

ELIXIR Hungary have launched a new online tool, COVIDoutcome. Upload COVID-19 FASTA files, select patient age and receive predictions on disease severity.
COVIDoutcome web tool

Nuria Lopez-Bigas selected for the ISCB 2021 Class of Fellows

ELIXIR Spain would like to congratulate colleague Nuria Lopez-Bigas, lead of the Barcelona Biomedical Genomics Lab at IRB Barcelona, on her selection to the ISCB 2021 Class of Fellows. She has been highlighted as a "leading innovator in computational cancer biology".
Read more and see the other nominations

Common Workflow Language Lesson Hackathon

22-23 March 2021 | Online

ELIXIR-NL organises this CWL Lesson hackathon. Previous work established the episodes, learning objectives and learner profiles. In this hackathon, you'll build on that work to create reusable lessons for the CWL community and many others.
Find out more
Register today

Focus meeting on Data Publishing and Archival

25 March 2021 | Online

Organised by Health-RI, SURF, DTL and UMC Utrecht, the meeting will showcase presentations and discussions on how to make data reusable and how to find reusable data, with a particular focus on medical research.
Register for the Focus meeting

Updates from Platforms

Submit your Data Platform Implementation Study proposals

Deadline approaching

Call for Scalable Curation Implementation Study Proposals now open! The call aims to improve data resource management across ELIXIR. Deadline 31 March.
View details and submit your proposal

Updates from other initiatives

EuropaBio Celebrates 25 years

EuropaBio, Europes leading life sciences industry association, are launching a programme of events, interviews and reviews to mark their 25th Anniversary.
View the programme

Updates from Communities

ELIXIR Plant Sciences publishes roadmap

Now published in the ELIXIR F1000 channel, this document details the Plant Science community's action plan for 2020-2023 promoting tools, databases, standards and best practices for plant research.
Discover the roadmap

Galaxy advanced features webinar series

10 March 2021 | Online, 5 pm CET

Join us for the next Galaxy advanced features webinar on "Processing thousands of datasets simultaneously".
Find all details and register

New video from the Galaxy Training Network

The Galaxy Training Network have released a new video showcasing what they have to offer. Have a little watch, or share the video with your colleagues. Produced by Geert Bonamie from VIB Bioinformatics Core.
YouTube link

Galaxy training network (GTN) promotional video 

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

Galaxy-ELIXIR webinars series: Advanced Features

3-24 March 2021 | Online, 5 pm CET every Wednesday

Introduction to working with Chemical Data and KNIME

8-12 March 2021 | Online

SURF Webinar: Sensitive Data Management and EUDAT Services

29 March 2021 | Online

KNIME Analytics Platform for Data Scientists (Life Science): Advanced

12-16 April 2021 | Online

Tools for reproducible research

19-23 April 2021 | Online

ELIXIR Events and Conferences

Innovation and SME Forum: Data-Driven Innovation in the Agritech Sector

1012 March 2021 | Online

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

Bioinformatician in Core Facility (100%)

University of Basel

Technical Coordinator: ELIXIR Human Genomics and Translational Data projects

European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)

Senior Post-doctoral Research Position Single Cell Analysis

Centre for Genomic Regulation

1-3 Data Stewards at ELIXIR-SE

NBIS / ELIXIR-SE

Systems Engineer (Research & Development specialist)

ELIXIR-Luxembourg / Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine