This week's highlights
BioHackathon Europe 2024: Call for project proposals open
Deadline: 14 April 2025 at midnight
The BioHackathon Europe brings together bioinformaticians from around the world, offering an intense week of hacking on diverse and exciting projects. Submit your project proposals through Oxford Abstracts ahead of the deadline.
Recommended reads
The Federated European GenomePhenome Archive as a global network for sharing human genomics data
A FEGA paper
In this era of rapidly expanding human genomics in research and healthcare, efficient data reuse is essential to maximise benefits for society. In response, the Federated European GenomePhenome Archive (FEGA) was launched in 2022, and as of 2024, the FEGA network was composed of seven national nodes. This paper describes the complexities, challenges and achievements of FEGA, unravelling the dynamic interplay of regulatory frameworks, technical challenges and the shared vision of advancing genomic research.
Read more
Bgee in 2024: focus on curated single-cell RNA-seq datasets and query tools
An ELIXIR Switzerland paper
Bgee is a database to retrieve and compare gene expression patterns in multiple animal species. In the past years, the reserachers have integrated single-cell RNA-sequencing expression data into Bgee through careful curation of public datasets in multiple species. Bgee can now provide one definitive answer all the way to the cell resolution about a genes expression pattern, comparable between species. The researchers have also updated the programmatic access tools and introduced a new web interface, providing detailed access to our annotations and expression data.
Read more
Updates from Nodes
10 years of advancing science together
ELIXIR Czech Republic celebrated it's 10-year anniversary, reflecting on a decade of significant contributions to life science research and looking forward to the future.
First call: ELIXIRxNextGenIT for National Open Access (TNA/NOA)
Deadline: 15 April 2025
TNA/NOA programmes aim to support scientists by providing free access to facilities, equipment, expertise, services and resources of research infrastructures that are not normally accessible. The ELIXIRxNextGenIT project is coordinating and managing access to the genomics and metabolomics services of three research facilities in Italy.
X-omics Festival 2025
April 14 2025 | Nijmegen, Netherlands
Join us for the seventh edition of the X-omics festival, The future of multi-omics research is now!, featuring keynote lectures, interactive discussions and sessions on the latest multi-omics advancements. Registration is free but required.
Call for Posters: Submit your abstract by March 21 2025 for a chance to present and compete for the best poster award. Selected posters may also be pitched in a plenary session.
Programme and registration
ELIXIR-NL is now on LinkedIn and Bluesky!
Toni Gabaldon from ELIXIR Spain recognised as the ISCB 2025 Class of Fellows
Toni Gabaldon, researcher at ICREA, the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and IRB Barcelona, part of ELIXIR Spain and co-lead of ELIXIR Biodiversity Community, has been recognised in the ISCB 2025 Class of Fellows for discoveries that have reshaped the understanding of genome evolution.
Updates from Platforms
ELIXIR Community Databases All Hands Meeting 2025 workshop survey
Deadline: 28 March 2025
Following ELIXIR Community input, the Data Platform will run a workshop on the ELIXIR Community Databases (ECD) concept at the ELIXIR All Hands Meeting 2025. This workshop is designed to offer an opportunity to ELIXIR members to shape this new concept. To maximise the use of the workshop time, all database stakeholders and Community members are asked for input via a short survey.
Fill out the survey
Updates from Communities
Register for the ELIXIR Rare Disease Community F2F/hybrid meeting
15-16 May (lunch to lunch) 2025 | Hybrid (Bologna, Italy)
Registration deadlines: 14 April (in person) | 14 May (virtual)
The ELIXIR Rare Disease Community F2F aims to bring together ELIXIR Rare Disease Community members to share ideas, learn about projects happening across Europe and internationally, and provide a focal point for rare disease-related topics. The meeting will include presentations, breakout sessions and networking.
Updates from other initiatives
Fifth EU-LAC joint call in science, technology and innovation 2025
The EU-LAC Interest Group towards the Common Research Area launches a new joint call to enhance the bi-regional cooperation in science, technology and innovation (STI). The aim of the joint call is to initiate sustainable and multilateral research cooperation between researchers from Europe, Latin-America and the Caribbean countries. Transnational consortia are invited to submit proposals related to six topics in the thematic fields of Global Challenges, Bioeconomy, Health, Energy and Open Science.
More information
OSCARS second open call for open science projects and services
Deadline: 14 May 2025 | 17:00 CEST
The aim of the call is to support researchers developing or engaging in open data research, conducting science projects that facilitate and foster sharing research data and results based on FAIR principles. The proposals should explain the breakthrough character of the project, demonstrate how FAIR data practices are enhanced throughout the project and identify the digital resources required or the envisaged connection to EOSC services.
More information
Videos about the 1+Million Genomes Initiative released for citizens and healthcare professionals
The European Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI) project has released three videos about the 1+Million Genomes (1+MG) Initiative, particularly targeted at citizens and healthcare professionals. The videos feature interviews with the GDI Coordinator and project partners and experts from Finland, Sweden, Italy and Ireland.
Read the news
Watch the videos
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 Estonia: Data visualisation (theory)
20 March 2025 | Online
SIB Course: First Steps with SQL for data science
10 April 2025 | Online
SIB course: Introduction to Bayesian statistics with R
5-6 May 2025 | Basel, Switzerland
SIB course: Introduction to metagenomics data analysis of microbial communities
7-9 May 2025 | Fribourg, Switzerland
EMBL-EBI course: Systems biology: from large datasets to biological insight
7-11 July 2025 | EMBL-EBI, UK
Summer School Machine Learning and AI
24-29 August 2025 | Geetbets, Belgium
ELIXIR Events and Conferences
Compute Platform in person meeting (2025)
25-26 March 2025 | Munich, Germany
Training Platform F2F/hybrid meeting (2025)
27-28 March 2025 | Munich, Germany
ELIXIR Microbiome Community F2F/hybrid meeting
9-10 April 2025 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain
ELIXIR Biodiversity Community F2F/hybrid meeting
10-11 April 2025 | Hybrid - Barcelona, Spain
ELIXIR All Hands 2025
2-5 June 2025 | Thessaloniki, Greece
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