Our communities of practice

At national level

  • UK Training Club

    Meeting every month and welcoming all, the group searches for funding opportunities and promotes training quality and diversity and inclusion of training activities.

  • UK RDM Club

    Welcoming all life sciences data stewards, support staff and researchers interested in RDM, this club meets every month to discuss activities that help researchers manage their data.

  • UK Human Data and Tech Club

    Join the UK human data and tech club connecting research infrastructure, technology and health data communities across ELIXIR and HDR UK.

  • BioinfoCoreLeaders Club

    A UK community for leaders and managers of bioinformatics, computational biology and related core shared research facilities.  

At European level

Activities within the wider ELIXIR Europe help coordinate the work of all its members and bring together experts across Europe, in or outside ELIXIR, to develop standards, services and training within specific life science domains. The UK Node co-leads several Communities, Platforms and ELIXIR Focus Groups, and our members are actively represented in all.

Not sure which to join?
UK clubs – our UK-based groups, open to anyone. Everything else below is Europe-wide.
Platforms – overarching areas, such as data, tools or training, that span the work of many Communities.
Communities – established groups focused on a specific life science domain.
Focus Groups – newer groups working on a specific topic for a set period, after which they either become a Community or close.

If you're interested in participating in any of these, but don't know where to start, contact us.

  • Show all
  • Platforms
  • Communities
  • Focus Groups
  • UK-led

  • 3D BioInfo Community

    Helping understand the structure of macromolecules like proteins and DNA. Christine Orengo (UCL) is one of the leads of this Community.

  • AI Ecosystem Focus Group

    Coordinates efforts across ELIXIR to address fragmentation and support the standardisation of AI/ML infrastructure.

  • Biodiversity Community

    Developing networks and working on a longer-term biodiversity strategy.

  • Cancer Data Community

    A Europe-wide community bringing together expertise and resources to gather, manage and analyse clinical and biomedical data for cancer research.

  • Compute Platform

    Developing services to make it easier to store, share and analyse large datasets.

  • Credit, Recognition and Usage Focus Group

    Improving how contributions to research and research infrastructure are recognised across ELIXIR.

  • Data Platform

    Identifying critical data resources across Europe and supporting the linkages between data and literature.

  • Domestic Animals Genome and Phenome Community

    Supports genotype-to-phenotype analysis for farmed and companion animal species

  • Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Focus Group

    Supporting a more inclusive, connected and sustainable ELIXIR community in which all members have equitable opportunities to participate, contribute and succeed.

  • Federated Human Data Community

    Developing long-term strategies for managing and accessing sensitive human data.

  • Food and Nutrition Community

    Exploring the effect of food choices on human health.

  • Galaxy Community

    Facilitating data import into Galaxy instances, helping develop and share Galaxy tools and workflows and increasing the provision of Galaxy training.

  • Human Copy Number Variation Community

    Facilitating detection, annotation and interpretation of human copy number variations.

  • Impact Focus Group

    Empowering ELIXIR members to evaluate and communicate their performance and impact supports their long-term sustainability.

  • Innovation & Industry Focus Group

    Internal group to learn about the engagement of external stakeholders and exchange experiences on local industry and innovation programmes.

  • Interoperability Platform

    Develops and encourages the adoption of standards to describe life science data.

  • Intrinsically Disordered Proteins Community

    Developing standards, tools and resources to help identify and characterise IDPs.

  • Metabolomics Community

    Providing the resources, analysis tools and infrastructure to help metabolite identification.

  • Microbial Biotechnology Community

    Helping develop tailor-made microbes and biological systems.

  • Microbiome Community

    Aims to overcome nonuniform practices in microbiome research by aligning standards, protocols and methods.

  • Pathogen Data Focus Group

    Establishing the basis for a distributed and interoperable network of regional and national pathogen data hubs.

  • Plant Sciences Community

    Facilitating genotype-phenotype analysis for crop and tree species.

  • Proteomics Community

    Developing and maintaining sustainable proteomics tools and data resources, and making the resources FAIR – Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.

  • Rare Diseases Community

    Creating a federated infrastructure to discover, access and analyse different rare disease repositories across Europe.

  • RDM Community

    Coordinating best practices and overview of ELIXIR resources in RDM in close collaboration with all other Communities and Platforms.

  • RNA Data Focus Group

    Addressing common challenges in data format standardisation, benchmarking and annotation for next-generation RNA sequencing.

  • Single-Cell Omics Community

    Identifying the main challenges in single-cell and spatial omics research and coordinating international efforts.

  • Systems Biology Community

    Modelling the dynamics of interactions and processes to understand the functionality of interactions between the multiple components of living systems. 

  • Tools Platform

    Helping communities find, register and benchmark software tools that allow researchers to access, analyse and integrate biological data and drive scientific discovery across the life sciences.

  • Toxicology Community

    Supporting the integration of standards, tools and resources to support toxicology research projects and risk governance at the national and international levels.

  • Training Platform

    A European coordination group aiming to strengthen training capacity and competence across Europe, and empowering researchers to utilise ELIXIR's services. ELIXIR-UK co-leads activities in consolidating materials and the Train the Trainer programme.