Eight ELIXIR-funded projects, worth a total of €705,000 and aimed at strengthening open science and supporting FAIR practices in the life sciences, have been selected to begin in 2026.
Applications for funding were invited in two of ELIXIR’s priority scientific areas – Cellular and molecular research and Biodiversity, food security and pathogens – and were assessed through peer review. The selected projects further the goals of ELIXIR’s Scientific Programme 2024–28 and link ELIXIR’s expert groups across Nodes, scientific Communities and technical Platforms.
The projects start in January 2026 and last 12 months. They add to eight projects which were selected following an open call last year and form part of ELIXIR's Commissioned Services, or internally-funded projects.
The successful project details are listed below, and further details on each project are available on the Commissioned Services webpages.
Biodiversity, food security and pathogens
- BioDiv-FAIR-Checker: Raising FAIRness of European biodiversity data through ELIXIR-aligned standards, services and training
ELIXIR Nodes: France, Switzerland, UK
Community: Biodiversity - Building FAIR metadata standards for non-human pathogen genomic and phenotypic data
ELIXIR Nodes: Germany, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland
Community: Research Data Management - Creation of a virtual assistant guiding plant researchers in making their datasets FAIR compliant
ELIXIR Nodes: Belgium, Germany, Netherlands
Communities: Plant Science, Research Data Management - FAIRferm: FAIRifying microbiome–metabolome time-series data from food fermentation processes
ELIXIR Nodes: Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland
Communities: Food and Nutrition, Microbiome - KYBELE: Knowledge Yield from Biodiversity Literature through Large Language Model (LLM) Extraction
ELIXIR Nodes: Greece, Italy, Switzerland
Communities: Biodiversity, Research Data Management
Cellular and molecular research
- FAIR annotation workflows for PDBe-KB via community-driven Nextflow development and training
ELIXIR Nodes: EMBL-EBI, Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden, UK
Communities: Intrinsically Disordered Proteins, Proteomics - FRET-IDP Community Resource: Integrating and standardising FRET data for disordered proteins
ELIXIR Nodes: Portugal, Hungary
Community: Intrinsically Disordered Proteins - TELLME: LLM-based narratives to explain and empower systems biology research
ELIXIR Nodes: Spain, Netherlands, UK
Communities: Single-Cell Omics, Systems Biology