Weekly Brief, 2 September 2024

This week's highlights

ELIXIR communications group meeting - Node communications

9 September 2024 | 14:00 - 15:00 CEST


Our next communications group meeting will be on 9 September 14:00 - 15:00 CEST. This meeting will focus on ELIXIR Nodes communications. Come and learn about comms activities in ELIXIR Nodes with Marilena D'Ambrosio from ELIXIR Italy and Heleri Inno from ELIXIR Estonia. No registration is necessary and the Zoom links are on the agendas.

Meeting agenda and Zoom link

Recommended reads

A mini-review on perturbation modelling across single-cell omic modalities

An ELIXIR supported paper


This research summarises novel single-cell perturbation technologies based on genetic manipulation like CRISPR or compounds, spanning across omic modalities. The authors review a group of computational methods extending from classical statistical inference methodologies to various machine and deep learning architectures like shallow models or autoencoders, to biologically informed approaches based on gene regulatory networks, and to combinatorial efforts reminiscent of ensemble learning. The researchers also assess the challenges that underline single-cell perturbation modelling while pointing towards relevant future perspectives like perturbation atlases, multi-omics and spatial datasets, causal machine learning for interpretability, multi-task learning for performance and explainability as well as prospects for solving interoperability and benchmarking pitfalls.

Read more

AggreProt: a web server for predicting and engineering aggregation prone regions in proteins

An ELIXIR Czech Republic paper


Recombinant proteins play pivotal roles in numerous applications including industrial biocatalysts or therapeutics. Despite the recent progress in computational protein structure prediction, protein solubility and reduced aggregation propensity remain challenging attributes to design. Identification of aggregation-prone regions is essential for understanding misfolding diseases or designing efficient protein-based technologies, and as such has a great socio-economic impact. Here, the authors introduce AggreProt, a user-friendly webserver that automatically exploits an ensemble of deep neural networks to predict aggregation-prone regions in protein sequences. AggreProt efficacy in predicting differential aggregation behaviours in proteins on several use cases, which emphasize its potential for guiding protein engineering strategies towards decreased aggregation propensity and improved solubility.

Read more

Updates from Nodes

An online survey on RDM and FAIR principles for researchers working with sensitive data

Deadline: 30 September 2024

This online survey aims to find out the level of knowledge and understanding researchers who work with sensitive data have about research data management (RDM) and the FAIR principles, and what the incentives and barriers are to good RDM and FAIR practices in research using sensitive health data. The survey will take approximately 20-30 minutes to complete.

Fill out the survey

Updates from Communities

ELIXIR Biodiversity, Food Security and Pathogens cross-Community workshop

12 September 2024 | 9:00 -13:00 CEST


The ELIXIR Biodiversity, Food Security and Pathogens cross-Community workshop will include presentations, strategy feedback and ELIXIR Communities engagement.

More information and registration

Updates from other initiatives

BioNT Community Event and CarpentryConnect

12- 14 November 2024 | Hybrid - Heidelberg, Germany


The international consortium BioNT is hosting its community event with the second European CarpentryConnect. The communities will meet to network and collaborate under the theme Community-led training beyond Academia on a 3-day event, with sessions in the format of keynotes, workshops, breakout discussions, lightning talks and posters.

More information and registration

Research webinar: Paving the way for equitable AI in biology - addressing sex and gender data imbalances in research and applications

3 September 2024 | 15:00 - 16:00 CEST


The European Commision Joint Research Centre (JRC) Trustworthy AI portfolio is hosting an event with JRC researchers to share their research in the importance of data in creating equitable AI in biology.

Join the webinar on Webex

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

VIB course: Research Data Management: your ally on the way to your publication
1, 8, 22 October 2024 | Ghent, Belgium

SIB course: Introduction to machine learning with Python
3 - 4 October 2024 | Basel, Switzerland

VIB course: Docker and Apptainer (Singularity) for reproducible and automated data analysis

14 - 15 October 2024 | Leuven, Belgium

SIB course: Ensuring More Accurate, Generalisable, and Interpretable Machine Learning Models for Bioinformatics
15 October 2024 | Online

SIB course: Version Control with Git
16 - 17 October 2024 | Bern, Switzerland

SIB course: Single-Cell transcriptomics with R
29 - 31 October 2024 | Bellinzona, Switzerland

SIB course: Introduction to Containers and Snakemake for Reproducible Research
21-22 October 2024 | Bern, Switzerland

EMBL-EBI course: Single-cell RNA-seq analysis with Python
17 - 21 February 2025 | Online

 

ELIXIR Events and Conferences


ECCB 2024
16 - 20 September 2024 | Turku, Finland


ELIXIR Single-Cell Omics Community meeting
16 - 17 September 2024 | Helsinki, Finland


ELIXIR Data Platform F2F 2024
1 - 2 October 2024 | Padova, Italy

ELIXIR STEERS WP2 & WP3 workshop
2 - 3 October 2024 | Padova, Italy


BioHackathon Europe 2024
4 - 8 November 2024 | Barcelona, Spain

ELIXIR Federated Human Data Community day
19 November 2024 | Lisbon, Portugal

ELIXIR Interoperability Platform F2F meeting (hybrid) 2024
25 - 26 November 2024 | Hybrid - Manchester, UK

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

Research Fellow / Senior Research Fellow
University College London

BioFAIR Architect

Earlham Institute

Senior Research Software Engineer

University of Nottingham

ELIXIR AT node coordinator (senior scientist)

University of Vienna and Medical University of Vienna

Career Development Fellows

Earlham Institute