Latest News & Announcements

Thanks to everyone who joined this year's ELIXIR All Hands meeting. This two week event brought together around 500 members of the ELIXIR community from across ELIXIR Nodes for a diversity of talks, workshops, mini-symposia, socials and even theatre plays! Our special thanks to all the speakers, and our hosts at ELIXIR-CZ. 

We look forward to the next ELIXIR All Hands meeting taking place in Amsterdam next year.

We have published our latest newsletter for June 2021, featuring updates on upcoming symposia, webinars, as well as training, vacancies and more.

Struggling with the data management of your research projects? The newly released RDMkit can help.

Our March newsletter has been released. This month we featured news on our speakers attending the upcoming Open Belgium 2021 - Frederik Coppens,  Miguel Roncoroni, and Ignacio Eguinoa; our data brokering of SARS-CoV-2 sequence data to the COVID-19 data portal; as well as the open call for ELIXIR's knowledge exchange scheme. If you'd like to know more about ELIXIR Belgium in the future, sign up for our latest newsletter below.

From the 10-12 March 2021, ELIXIR hosted the virtual Innovation and SME Forum on Data-driven Innovation in the Agritech sector. The event was hugely successful and highlighted the importance of FAIR data in the context of precision agriculture and plant breeding. Among the keynote speakers were Monica Solanki (Agrimetrics) and Fred Van Ex (INARI). Klaas Vandepoele and Stijn Dhondt, both from the VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology, showcased how the PLAZA and PIPPA platforms contribute to making existing data more FAIR.  

After a comprehensive internal and external evaluation process, PLAZA becomes an ELIXIR Recommended Interoperability Resource (RIR). Together with three other resources (BioImage Informatics Index, FAIRtracks and OmicsDI), PLAZA has now joined the list alongside the existing ten.

The 2021 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2021), originally planned to take place in Ghent, is moving to a virtual format. Things are just too uncertain to continue to plan an in person event for early July. Moving online presents many challenges, but also offers opportunities for making this event more accessible and affordable than an in-person event. GCC2021 is embracing those opportunities and we are pleased to announce

The COVID-19 Data Portal brings together and continuously updates relevant COVID-19 datasets. EMBL created a video on the COVID-19 Data Portal and how it enables the scientific community to develop tools and services that support infectious diseases research. One of the examples mentioned in the video is the Galaxy tool developed last year by our team, that allows easy submission of SARS-CoV-2 sequence data to the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA).

Our first newsletter of 2021 is out. In addition to achievements in 2020, we report on a few upcoming meetings including the Galaxy Community Conference we are co-organising this year.

The new year brings our first video! The video gives a walkthrough on how to upload SARS-CoV-2 sequence data and its metadata to the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) using our newly developed Galaxy tool. All details can also be found on our data management website https://rdm.elixir-belgium.org/covid-19.