Weekly Brief, 10 March 2025

This week's highlights

We are on Bluesky!

ELIXIR Europe has joined Bluesky!
Follow us if you are on the platform: @elixir-europe.org
 

Save the Date: Upcoming calls for Cellular and Molecular Research (CMR) and Biodiversity, Food Security and Pathogens (BFSP) funding

We are happy to announce upcoming funding opportunities for projects in Cellular and Molecular Research (CMR) and Biodiversity, Food Security, and Pathogens (BFSP) as part of the Science Tier of the ELIXIR Scientific Programme 2024-2028.

The process will consist of two steps:

  • Expression of Interest: from 12 May to 16 June 2025.

  • Full Submission: from 23 June to 15 September 2025.
    (Please note that an Expression of Interest is required prior to full submission.)

Detailed requirements and selection criteria will be published in May 2025. Please stay tuned for further updates and mark your calendars for these opportunities.

Recommended reads

Genomic reanalysis of a pan-European rare-disease resource yields new diagnoses

A Solve-RD paper


Genetic diagnosis of rare diseases requires accurate identification and interpretation of genomic variants. Clinical and molecular scientists from 37expert centers across Europe created the Solve-Rare Diseases Consortium (Solve-RD) resource, encompassing clinical, pedigree and genomic rare-disease data, and performed systematic reanalysis for 6,447individuals (3,592male, 2,855female) with previously undiagnosed rare diseases from 6,004families. The researchers established a collaborative, two-level expert review infrastructure that allowed a genetic diagnosis in 506 (8.4%) families. The infrastructure and collaborative networks set up by Solve-RD can serve as a blueprint for future, further scalable international efforts. The resource is open to the global rare-disease community, allowing phenotype, variant and gene queries, as well as genome-wide discoveries.

Read more

RBP-Tar a searchable database for experimental RBP binding sites

An ELIXIR Czech Republic paper


RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) play a critical role in regulating gene expression by binding to specific sites on RNA molecules. Identifying these binding sites is crucial for understanding the many functions of RBPs in cellular function, development and disease. To make this data more accessible to the scientific community, the researchers have developed RBP-Tar, a web server and database that utilises eCLIP data for 167 RBPs mapped on the human genome. The web server allows researchers to easily search and retrieve binding site information by genomic location and RBP name. The goal is to continue to populate the web server with additional experimental datasets from CLIP experiments as they become available and processed, making it an increasingly valuable resource for the scientific community.


Read more

Updates from Nodes

 

NuGOweek 2025 call for abstracts open

22-25 September 2025 | Dublin, Ireland
Deadline: 17 April 2025

NuGOweek 2025 will focus on Molecular Understandings to Promote Healthy and Sustainable Diets. Sumit an abstract to present your research in the areas of molecular nutrition, personalised nutrition, nutrigenomics, nutritional systems biology and metabolomics.

More information

NuGO webinar on Mendelian randomisation

19 March 2025 | 15:00 CET | Online


Join this webinar organised by the NuGO New Developments Working Group led by Professor Lorraine Brennan (UCD, Ireland) and explore the application of Mendelian randomisation in nutrition research.

Register now

Updates from Communities

 

Toxicology Community workshop: Making toxicology tools more accessible and interoperable

26 & 27 March 2025 | Uppsala, Sweden


This workshop is organised by the Toxicology Community for toxicologists interested in computational toxicology and how it can be used for/with their own experimental data. The speakers will present existing tools for toxicology and user stories on data and tools to illustrate challenges and opportunities in toxicology.

More information and registration

Updates from Focus Groups

 

EOSC Focus Group ELIXIR All Hands 2025 workshop survey

Deadline: 21 March 2025

The ELIXIR EOSC Focus Group will run a workshop on the EOSC Nodes concept at the ELIXIR All Hands Meeting 2025. This workshop is hoped to align ELIXIR members over this concept and feed into the next ELIXIR-EOSC Strategy formation. To maximise the use of the workshop time, the Focus Group members would like to ask ELIXIR Nodes and anyone interested in the EOSC Nodes concept to provide input via a short survey.

Fill out the survey

Updates from other initiatives

 

A federated future to support genomic medicine


The Federated European Genome-phenome Archive (FEGA) has expanded its network and continues to evolve by embracing emerging technologies. Building on the longstanding European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA), FEGA enables researchers to securely discover and analyse human genomic data while ensuring compliance with national and international data protection regulations.

Read the news

 

EOSC-ENTRUST Policy Brief: The importance of Trusted Research Environments


The EOSC-ENTRUST project has published its first policy brief highlighting the importance of European investment in Trusted Research Environments (TREs). The policy brief also identifies five recommendations for policymakers.

Read the news and the full policy brief

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

ELIXIR Estonia: Data visualisation (theory)
20 March 2025 | Online

SIB Course: First Steps with SQL for data science
10 April 2025 | Online

SIB course: Introduction to Bayesian statistics with R
5-6 May 2025 | Basel, Switzerland


SIB course: Introduction to metagenomics data analysis of microbial communities
7-9 May 2025 | Fribourg, Switzerland

EMBL-EBI course: Systems biology: from large datasets to biological insight

7-11 July 2025 | EMBL-EBI, UK

Summer School Machine Learning and AI
24-29 August 2025 | Geetbets, Belgium

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
9-10 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

 

Cyber Security Lead

EMBL-EBI

Group Leader - Molecular Mechanisms of Environmental Adaptation

EMBL-EBI

Group Leader - Quantitative Biology

Cancer Research UK

Senior Research Data Scientist

University College London