NeoSpan will focus on designing a prototype workflow for retrieving and spatially mapping neoantigens from spatial omics datasets. As interest in spatially resolved biology is growing, researchers need tools to combine mutation detection, neoantigen prediction, gene expression and spatial coordinates in a unified analysis. As part of this Staff Exchange, Greek and Dutch teams will develop the initial framework for this pipeline, drawing on their combined expertise in single-cell and spatial omics, cancer immunology and computational method development.

This Staff Exchange will support international participation in two established Portuguese student-driven initiatives: the Bioinformatics League and the Bioinformatics Open Days (BOD). Building on earlier collaborations, the Portuguese Node intends to open both activities to teams and contributors from Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands and Denmark, so a broader network of students and early-career researchers can engage in challenge-based learning.

This Staff Exchange will involve a coordinated effort across several ELIXIR Nodes to refine and formalise how the FAIR principles should apply to training materials. The work will consolidate ongoing discussions from the ELIXIR Training Platform and wider training community into a coherent framework. A series of targeted virtual meet-ups will be organised throughout the year to gather feedback, test wording and align the proposal with existing best practices.

This Staff Exchange will involve a coordinated effort across several ELIXIR Nodes to refine and formalise how the FAIR principles should apply to training materials. The work will consolidate ongoing discussions from the ELIXIR Training Platform and wider training community into a coherent framework. A series of targeted virtual meet-ups will be organised throughout the year to gather feedback, test wording and align the proposal with existing best practices.

Participants in this Staff Exchange will focus on improving IT service management practices and supporting the operation of federated human data services in Sweden and Switzerland. Both Nodes are active in the European Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI) and FEGA initiatives, and improving how services are organised and run will lead to more consistent operations across the network.

A new, hands-on machine learning (ML) training school will be set up under this Staff Exchange to respond to the growing demand for AI and ML skills across ELIXIR. Building on ongoing activities in the ELIXIR community, the organisers will design a coherent learning path introducing core ML concepts, deep learning and generative AI, and placing them in the context of existing reporting guidelines and regulatory frameworks, including the DOME recommendations and the EU AI Act.

A new training course in spatial transcriptomics will be developed and delivered in Lausanne as part of this Staff Exchange. Spatial omics has grown rapidly in recent years, yet many ELIXIR Nodes have limited capacity to train researchers in these methods. The need for coordinated training was highlighted in the 2023 skills gap survey conducted by the ELIXIR Single-Cell Omics Community and the ELIXIR Training Platform.

ELIXIR Czech Republic and ELIXIR Netherlands will jointly work on a dedicated ontology for biological membranes in this Staff Exchange. Although several molecular domains are already served by established ontologies, there is currently no shared vocabulary that describes membrane structure, function or related experimental approaches. Creating one will help harmonise how membrane-related data are represented across ELIXIR services.

This Staff Exchange will involve contributors from ELIXIR Portugal, ELIXIR France and other collaborators to explore how artificial intelligence tools can support user-friendly querying of plant knowledge graphs. It will focus on combining the BioCypher framework with the Breeding API and other plant data sources, as well as developing a proof-of-concept chatbot interface for researchers using BioChatter.

This Staff Exchange will connect contributors from multiple ELIXIR Nodes to prepare an early, minimal viable version of the Data Steward Handbook. This will build on the momentum of the May 2024 contentathon, aiming to publish an initial version of the Handbook to support the wider ELIXIR research data management (RDM) community.