Understanding molecular biodiversity is essential for ecological conservation and sustainable development. While a vast array of molecular data awaits exploration, its lack of connectivity with other sources of data and metadata such as geographical reference, habitat, population size and phenotypic data often pose significant barriers to biodiversity research.
Understanding molecular biodiversity is essential for ecological conservation and sustainable development. While a vast array of molecular data awaits exploration, its lack of connectivity with other sources of data and metadata such as geographical reference, habitat, population size and phenotypic data often pose significant barriers to biodiversity research.
The standardisation and accessibility of plant data is a major challenge for agricultural research. MIAPPE, which was developed as part of the transPLANT and ELIXIR-EXCELERATE projects, has made a decisive contribution to unifying data capturing. Also, the FONDUE Implementation Study facilitated the integration of phenotypic and genotypic data.
Metagenomics Assembled Genomes (MAGs) are crucial for understanding biodiversity, enhancing food security and combating pathogens by providing insight on uncultured and unexplored genomes. This proposal outlines a comprehensive project aimed at advancing metagenomics research through the advancement, optimisation, evaluation and dissemination of robust FAIR workflows for building MAGs.
With the declining cost of genome sequencing, the focus of plant researchers is shifting towards characterising the wide genomic diversity present within a species. Crop pan-genomes consist of the sequencing, comparison and integration of multiple different genomes from the same agriculturally important species such as wheat, rice and potatoes. Exploiting the information encoded within these pan-genomes can lead to the development of new cultivars more resilient to upcoming challenges like increased drought and heat stress.
Through the 1+Million Genomes (1+MG) initiative, Europe is scaling up efforts to build a shared framework and infrastructure to safely access and integrate clinical human data across borders, following regulatory efforts like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the European Health Data Space (EHDS). These are pivotal in safeguarding sensitive information, while enabling authorised access for researchers, healthcare professionals and other actors.
Federated analysis (FA) is transforming genomics research by enabling collaborative computation across distributed datasets, all while preserving data privacy. It supports comprehensive insight generation without centralising sensitive data – a crucial advancement in genomic medicine. Federated access and analysis of human datasets is a key component of the ELIXIR Scientific Programme.
The Federated European Genome-Phenome Archive (FEGA) network is an ELIXIR-supported infrastructure for making human genomic data discoverable and accessible across ELIXIR Nodes. This project seeks to accelerate data depositions into FEGA, which will significantly increase the data flow in and from FEGA nodes.
Today, research generates more data than ever, and a multitude of experimental data types. Such data types are often connected at source: perhaps generated from the same samples or as part of the same study. It is important that different data types are made available for re-use in a linked and coordinated manner, enabling full reuse of all the data in integrated analysis. Experimental data types are often siloed in varied specialised repositories, using different metadata models, so linking them is not straightforward.
Human data, especially genomic data, is increasingly being federated across borders and institutions, with many stakeholders participating in multinational and global biomedical and health data networks, fostering collaborations and partnerships. While such international efforts are essential for the compilation and reuse of data, regulatory constraints often hinder the movement of certain data beyond organisational or national boundaries.