Supporting UK-led projects at BioHackathon Europe 2024
ELIXIR-UK supported 22 participants from 11 organisations at BioHackathon Europe 2024, held in November near Barcelona, where 300 participants from the life sciences research community gathered to tackle critical challenges in bioinformatics.
This backing from ELIXIR-UK, which included funding for travel and accommodation, endorsed and encouraged UK participants to lead a total of eight projects. With a high project approval rate of 90%, ELIXIR-UK members consistently strengthen UK contributions to this annual event organised by ELIXIR Europe.
This year’s UK-led projects addressed wide-ranging bioinformatics challenges:
- Reducing the environmental impact of Galaxy – Nicola Soranzo (co-lead), aimed at lowering the environmental footprint of the Galaxy platform widely used for bioinformatics workflows.
- Galaxy CoDex – Wendi Bacon (co-lead), focused on ensuring sustainability within the Galaxy community through resource aggregation and annotation.
- BioSchemas for mortals – Nick Juty (co-lead) and Phil Reed (co-lead), to simplify Bioschemas and increase accessibility for diverse user groups.
- Interconnecting identifiers.org into broader metadata connectivity – Nick Juty (co-lead), aimed at enhancing interoperability in metadata across platforms.
- Creating user benefit from ARC-ISA RO-Crate machine-actionability – Eli Chadwick (co-lead), developing tools for automated, machine-actionable data sharing.
- Structuring clinical reports into OMOP Common Data Model (CDM) – Tim Beck (co-lead), converting clinical data into a widely-used standard model to improve data interoperability.
- MARS: Multi-omics adapter for repository submissions – Philippe Rocca-Serra (co-lead), building systems for seamless multi-omics data submission.
- Increasing FAIRness of digital agrosystem resources – Marco Brandizi (co-lead), extending FAIR data principles to agricultural data systems.
Impact of BioHackathon participation
ELIXIR-UK’s ongoing support for BioHackathon Europe has enabled UK participants to expand their technical skills, interdisciplinary understanding, and professional networks – key impacts documented in a study by Castro et al. (2021). Past participants report that they often apply new technical skills within six months, showing that BioHackathon projects have immediate and lasting effects on their work. Additionally, in-person collaboration opportunities, which ELIXIR-UK supports for its members, have proven effective in fostering international and cross-cultural exchanges, enhancing collaboration in ways that remote work alone cannot achieve.
Participants consistently improve their ability to collaborate across disciplines and advance research objectives. ELIXIR-UK’s support for this engagement underscores its commitment to broadening UK impact in bioinformatics as these collaborative projects continue to drive forward innovations in data-driven research.
Notes to editors
About ELIXIR-UK
ELIXIR-UK is part of the European ELIXIR infrastructure, which supports life science research and its translation to medicine, the environment, and society. By integrating national bioinformatics resources, ELIXIR-UK aims to provide a sustainable infrastructure for biological information, ensuring that data is effectively managed, analysed and shared across the scientific community.
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