Weekly Brief, 4 December 2023

This week's highlights

ELIXIR announces new Director

The ELIXIR Board has appointed Tim Hubbard as the next ELIXIR Director. Tim brings a wealth of scientific, technical and management experience and is currently Professor of Bioinformatics in the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics at King's College London, Senior Advisor at Genomics England and Associate Director of the London region of Health Data Research UK (HDR UK).
Tim will take up his position in March 2024. From today, 1 December, until the end of May 2024, Andy Smith, ELIXIRs Head of External Relations, will also act as ELIXIR Interim Director

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ELIXIR publishes 2024-28 Scientific Programme

ELIXIR has published its new Scientific Programme, setting out the European life science data infrastructures vision for the coming five years. The Scientific Programme forms ELIXIRs strategy and sets out its ambitions and goals until 2028. The ELIXIR Programme is developed with extensive input from expert working groups across ELIXIRs 22 Nodes.

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New job vacancy: ELIXIR Digital Content Editor

ELIXIR Hub is looking for a talented Digital Content Editor to write and edit text for the main ELIXIR website as well as smaller project websites like the GDI project, the BY-COVID project and the new EOSC-ENTRUST project.

Find out more

Updates from Nodes

PhD-SNPg: updating a webserver and lightweight tool for scoring nucleotide variants

An ELIXIR-IT paper

One of the primary challenges in human genetics is determining the functional impact of single nucleotide variants and insertion and deletions, whether coding or noncoding. In the past, methods have been created to detect disease-related single amino acid changes, but only some can assess the influence of noncoding variations. Here the authors present an updated version, trained on a larger dataset, that can also predict the impact of the InDel variations. Despite its simplicity, PhD-SNPg performs similarly to CADD, making it ideal for rapid genome interpretation and as a benchmark for tool development.

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Charges: partial atomic charges for AlphaFold structures in high quality

An ELIXIR-CZ paper

The AlphaFold2 prediction algorithm opened up the possibility of exploring proteins structural space at an unprecedented scale. The authors introduce the web application Charges: a tool for the quick calculation of partial atomic charges for protein structures from AlphaFoldDB. The charges are calculated by the recent empirical method SQE+qp, parameterised for this class of molecules using robust quantum mechanics charges on PROPKA3 protonated structures. The computed partial atomic charges can be downloaded in common data formats or visualised via the powerful Mol* viewer.

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UKRI funding supports EMBL-EBI infrastructure upgrade in response to increasing data demand

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) has confirmed 80.7 million of funding for EMBLs European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The funding comes from the UKRI Infrastructure Fund and will be distributed over the course of six years. It is set to help EMBL-EBI transform its technical infrastructure to meet the data needs of the life sciences community.

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Updates from Platforms

Register for Compute Platform F2F meeting

24-25 January 2024 | Hybrid - Brno, Czech Republic

The Compute Platform F2F will take place over 1.5 days on 24-25 January 2024. We invite you to join us and register for the event which will take place at Brno, Czech Republic. Online remote attendee registration is also possible for the event. The agenda is being finalised and registration can be found on the event website alongside further event details.

Find out more and register

Updates from Communities

Latest Developments in Structural Bioinformatics

5 December 2023 | 10:00 - 11:00 CET

Join the ELIXIR 3D BioInfo webinar this Tuesday on the latest developments in structural bioinformatics.

Updates from other initiatives

GA4GH and the INCF welcome members worldwide to join the new community

The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) has joined with the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility(INCF) to launch the new group. Any interested ELIXIR community members are invited to join and help lay the groundwork for connecting international neuroscience and genomic data.
The GA4GH & INCF Neuroscience Community group will develop the standards, collaborations, and systems needed to power neuroscience data visiting across a global network.

Find out more

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

8th de.NBI Genomics training course
11-12 December 2023 | Giessen, Germany

BioSB course: Integrated modeling and optimization
11-15 December 2023 | Wageningen, the Netherlands

PerMedCoE course: From transcriptomics to mechanistic models of signalling
12 December 2023 | 12:00-16:30 CET | Online

SIB course: First Steps with UNIX in Life Sciences
16 January 2024 | Basel, Switzerland

SIB course: Introduction to Statistics with R
22 -24 January 2024 | Lausanne, Switzerland

SIB course: Introduction to Viral Bioinformatics
23 January 2024 | Online

SIB course: First Steps with R in Life Sciences
1-2 February 2024 | Lausanne, Switzerland

ELIXIR Events and Conferences

RDM Community & Implementation Study Kick-off Meeting
4-6 December 2023 | Hybrid - Bergen, Norway

ELIXIR Compute Platform 2024 Face-to-Face Meeting
24-25 January 2024 | Brno, Czech Republic

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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