Latest News & Announcements

We have developed, in collaboration with ELIXIR Germany and the European COVID-19 Data Platform, a tool to simplify the submission of viral sequencing data to the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), a resource providing open access to nucleotide sequences. The submission tool offers an easy-to-use interface, guides researchers through the submission process and verifies the data format and description.

Submitting data to deposition databases requires a learning curve and can therefore be time consuming at the first submission. Our team developed an ENA upload tool to facilitate submission of viral sequence data to ENA.

One of our key tasks is to build a data management and data analysis infrastructure for life sciences research. For data management, we are building on the FAIRDOMhub open source platform. The Belgian instance of fairdomhub.be is in full development and will allow researchers to manage their research data and produce FAIR data by design. To enforce our data management team, we have an open position for Data Management Usability Officer. Apply here

The department Economy, Science and Innovation (EWI) and the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) have joined forces to make an overview of large-scale and international research infrastructures in which they have invested over the last 10 years. ELIXIR Belgium to be found on pages 32-33.

We have opened the second call for ELIXIR Belgium Node Services and invite our partner institutes (UGent, KULeuven, VUB, ULB, UAntwerpen, UHasselt, VIB, ULiège and Sciensano) to apply for one or more Node Services.

On April 2nd, we lost James Taylor, co-founder of Galaxy, mentor, friend and inspiration. 

Data scientist Lieset Peeters from the University of Hasselt is leading a global project on the impact of the coronavirus on Multiple Sclerosis patients. The MS Data Alliance and the MS International Foundation (MSIF) are collaborating to collect and share data for analysis. Qmenta is providing their platform, Amazon will be responsible for the compute power.

In the second Newsletter of the year, we highlight our collaborative work on COVID-19 data analysis. Have a good read!

Together with three other usegalaxy teams across the globe (Germany, Australia, US), we re-analysed the available COVID-19 data and assessed the reproducibility of initial papers on the COVID-19 genome.

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus highlights the need for an open analytics environment so that the global research community can collaborate on developing effective countermeasures.