Weekly Brief, 16 January 2023

This week's highlights

Reminder: Call for Workshops at ELIXIR All Hands Meeting 2023

Deadline: 23 January 2023

Workshop applications for the AHM need to be submitted by 23 January 2023 (Monday). Submissions should be made through Oxford Abstracts and should be of interest to more than one ELIXIR group.

More details and the link for submissions

Open call for new members of ELIXIR F1000 Gateway Advisory Board

In 2023, ELIXIR wishes to expand the size of the current F1000 Gateway Advisory Board to be more representative of the geographic breadth of the ELIXIR Nodes and more diverse in terms of nationality, area(s) of activity in ELIXIR, career stage, gender, and ethnic origin. Apply by 15 March 2023 if you are interested in joining.

More information

Survey on ELIXIR and Australian BioCommons Collaboration Strategy

After the Australian BioCommons and ELIXIR Collaboration Strategy launch in April 2020, the Collaboration Strategy had already achieved much at its mid-way point. As we work towards renewing the Collaboration Strategy in April 2023, we are keen to gather information on outcomes and impacts that have arisen from this Collaboration, along with your feedback on how it went.

The survey will remain open until 28 February 2023, but early responses will be used to inform a presentation to the ELIXIR Heads of Nodes on 02 February.

Fill out the survey by 28 February 2023

Recommended reads

CWLD: Mapping colloquial wet lab language to ontologies

A BioHackathon paper

The highly formalised terminology used by ontology terms does not always match the colloquial language used by practitioners. This problem is particularly relevant in the ELIXIR Microbial Biotechnology community, as the tools developed often use ontology terms directly rather than the language used in the wet lab. At the BioHackathon 2022, the authors addressed this problem by (a) mining the internet for colloquial language used by biologists; (b) constructing a dictionary (CWLD: colloquial wet lab dictionary) of this language and its mappings to ontology terms; and (c) constructing a table of the occurrences of different terminology used in Microbial Biotechnology tools and resources. The authors hope that the dictionary will serve as a helpful resource for anyone hoping to map from colloquial wet lab language to ontology terms.

Read more

Galaxy Training: A powerful framework for teaching

A Galaxy Training paper

The Galaxy Training Network (GTN) has previously developed the Galaxy Training Platform, an open access, community-driven framework for the collection of FAIR training materials for data analysis utilizing the user-friendly Galaxy framework as its primary data analysis platform. Since its inception, this training platform has thrived, with the number of tutorials and contributors growing rapidly, and the range of topics extending beyond life sciences to include topics such as climatology, cheminformatics, and machine learning. While initially aimed at supporting researchers directly, the GTN framework has proven to be an invaluable resource for educators as well. Here, the authors present the latest developments in the GTN project, aimed at facilitating the use of the Galaxy Training materials by educators, and its usage in different learning environments.

Read more

Updates from Nodes

A new member joined ELIXIR Swiss Node

Lucy Poveda joined SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics as ELIXIR Swiss Node Coordinator.

Submit an abstract for [BC]2 conference 2023

The next edition of the [BC]2 Basel Computational Biology Conference Big data in biology: promises and challenges, organized by SIB will take place on 11-13 September 2023. The call for abstracts is open until 15 March 2023.

More information

LAST CALL The SIB Bioinformatics Awards

Deadline: 31 January 2023

The SIB Bioinformatics Awards acknowledges early career bioinformaticians and ground-breaking resources of national and international standing. The international awards honour excellence in bioinformatics and computational biology within three categories:

PhD Paper Award
Early Career Award
Innovative Resource Award

Submit now

BioSB 2023 Conference

9-10 May 2023 | Egmond aan Zee, the Netherlands

The BioSB 2023 conference will be held on 9 and 10 May 2023 in Hotel Zuiderduin in Egmond aan Zee the Netherlands. The abstract submission is now open.

More information

Updates from Communities

ELIXIR Microbial Biotechnology Community: Call for new co-lead

Deadline: 27 February 2023

The ELIXIR Microbial Biotechnology Community is looking for one new co-lead to join the Community leadership team (Vitor Martins dos Santos and Anil Wipat). Candidates should submit a short statement of their background and what they believe they will bring to the role.

Thank you to Vincent Fromion for his co-leadership and activity.

For any questions or nominations, please contact clare.garrard [at] elixir-europe.org (Clare Garrard)

More information

Updates from Other Initiatives

Contentathon for the Infectious Diseases Toolkit

13-15 March 2023 | Ghent, Belgium
Registration deadline: 27 February 2023

This is a working event for participants to contribute on Pathogen characterisation, Socioeconomic data, Human biomolecular data, Human clinical and health data, Showcase and National resources. The event is designed for both BY-COVID and non-BY-COVID participants.

More information and registration

Towards FAIR Digital Twins

Session 1: 26 January 2023 | 14:00-15:00 CET | Online
Session 2: 13 February 2023 | 16:00-17:00 CET | Online

The events are organised by the Horizon Europe project BioDT, which is working to develop a digital twin prototype to help protect and restore biodiversity. During these one-hour webinars, BioDT project partners and experts in the FAIR field are going to stimulate conversations around FAIR with a focus on BioDT and the digital twinning paradigm.

More information and registration

FAIRplus survey result

In November 2022, FAIRplus project partner, The Hyve, conducted a survey to find out what is the need for new FAIR services and for improvement of the existing ones. The survey result and analysis are now released.

Find out the result of the survey

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

SIB course: Discover ViralZone
18 January 2023 | Virtual

SIB & ELIXIR CONVERGE course: Research Data Management and Data Management Plan
26 & 27 January 2023 | Lausanne, Switzerland

6th Advanced in silico Drug Design workshop/challenge 2023
30 January-2 February 2023 | Olomouc, Czech Republic

SIB course: Introduction to Statistics with R
6-9 February 2023 | Lausanne, Switzerland

BioSB Series: Constraint-based modeling
13-17 February 2023 | Wageningen, the Netherlands

SIB course: NGS - Genome Variant Analysis
20-21 February 2023 | Bern, Switzerland

SIB course: First Steps with Python in Life Sciences
1-3 March 2023 | Lausanne, Switzerland

SIB course: Single-cell Transcriptomics
6- 8 March 2023 | Online

BioSB Series: Knowledge graphs in the life sciences
13-17 March 2023 | Wageningen, the Netherlands

ELIXIR Events and Conferences

Compute Platform 2023 F2F meeting
7-8 February 2023 | Helsinki, Finland

Training Platform 2023 F2F meeting
7-9 March 2023 | Hybrid - Rome, Italy

ELIXIR All Hands 2023
5-8 June 2023 | Dublin, Ireland

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

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