Weekly Brief, 5 August 2024

This week's highlights

Enhancing SME access to European research and technology infrastructures: a pathway to innovation & growth workshop report

The workshop "Enhancing SME access to European research and technology infrastructures: a pathway to innovation & growth" was co-organised by Alba Synchrotron, ELIXIR, ESRF, Euro-Bioimaging and INESC Brussels HUB. This event brought together over 40 participants, including SME associations, industry representatives, policymakers, funders, and major European RTIs. The report summarises outcomes of the workshop.

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EFPIA - Data Sharing Playbook to unlock health partnerships

Drawing on the vast experience of researchers who have worked on pre-competitive projects, the Data Sharing Playbook aims to accelerate data sharing by moving data to the centre of the planning stage.

Find out more

Recommended reads

Copy number variant risk loci for schizophrenia converge on the BDNF pathway

An EJP RD paper

In this study, the authors developed machine-readable interactive pathways to enable analysis of functional effects of genes within CNV loci and identify ten common pathways across CNVs with high schizophrenia risk using the WikiPathways database, schizophrenia risk gene collections from GWAS studies, and a gene-disease association database. The approach highlights the importance of not only investigating deleted or duplicated genes within pathogenic CNV loci, but also study their direct interaction partners, which may explain pleiotropic effects of CNVs on schizophrenia risk and offer a broader field for interventions.

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RIP-seq reveals RNAs that interact with RNA polymerase and primary sigma factors in bacteria

An ELIXIR Czech Republic paper

Bacteria have evolved structured RNAs that can associate with RNA polymerase. To identify all RNAs interacting with RNAP and the primary factors, the authors have established and performed native RIP-seq in Bacillus subtilis, Corynebacterium glutamicum, Streptomyces coelicolor, Mycobacterium smegmatis and the pathogenic Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The authors discovered novel types of structured RNAs that associate with RNAP. This paper dentified other species-specific RNAs including full-length mRNAs, revealing a previously unknown landscape of RNAs interacting with the bacterial transcription machinery.

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Updates from Nodes

Why clinical trials stop: the role of genetics

In a study published in Nature Genetics, researchers at Open Targets and EMBL-EBI created a machine learning approach to analyse the free-text reasons explaining why 28,842 clinical trials stopped.

Read the news

Updates from other initiatives

From open data to knowledge: enhancing European resilience to health crises

11 September 2024 | Brussels, Belgium

This BY-COVID event will highlight and discuss the value of open data and showcase the impact of the project on science and society with experts from the European and international scene, industry and academia.

More information and registration

Change of Bioinformatics co-executive editor

Alfonso Valencia, Head of Node of ELIXIR Spain, is stepping down as Executive Editor of Bioinformatics after 20 years of service. In light of this announcement, the Bioinformatics team announced the appointment of Inanc Birol as the new Co-Executive Editor.

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RItrainPlus management training programme

The RItrainPlus management training programme includes seven courses aimed at current and future professionals in Research Infrastructures or Core Facilities. The call for applications is open until 9 September 2024.

More information

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 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 Administrator

ELIXIR-UK Node / Earlham Institute

Senior Research Community Manager

Imperial College London

Postdoctoral Research Scientist - Gut Cell Atlas

Earlham Institute

Postdoctoral Research Scientist - Engineering plant-beneficial rhizobacteria

Earlham Institute

Career Development Fellows

Earlham Institute