Strengthening ties with European research infrastructures at ELIXIR All Hands
Photo credit: Mikael Wallerstedt
A special seat at an international table was recently reserved for Australian BioCommons to share insights and address the challenges of building and sustaining distributed life science data infrastructure. The invitation to represent Australia’s activities at the 2024 ELIXIR All Hands provided the opportunity to reach more than 500 professionals from over 25 countries. Participants shared their successes and looked to collaboratively address ongoing challenges facing life science research infrastructures.
ELIXIR, as Europe’s life science research infrastructure, has a mission that is closely aligned with that of Australian BioCommons, and we have maintained a collaboration strategy since 2020. With ongoing face to face interactions a key component of the strategy, Australian BioCommons was well represented at the 2024 All Hands meeting with Dr Jeff Christiansen, Dr Tiff Nelson, and Dr Ziad Al Bkhetan all attending in Uppsala, Sweden.
The BioCommons team joined stimulating discussions that addressed key areas in ELIXIR’s scientific vision including cellular and molecular research; biodiversity, food security and pathogen; and human data and translational research. Among these discussions, Ziad presented the Australian Nextflow Seqera Service while Tiff shared our array of infrastructure supporting genomics research in Australia. Tiff was particularly excited by the emerging focus on biodiversity:
As European research data infrastructures’ focus turns to biodiversity, our experience working with Bioplatforms Australia Framework Initiatives like the Threatened Species Initiative and the Amphibian and Reptile Genome Initiative becomes so valuable. We’re looking forward to continued discussions with ELIXIR’s biodiversity community.
Jeff also found great value in making connections with other national infrastructure providers at All Hands 2024, including having the opportunity to also visit the Swedish Node of ELIXIR, National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS) at SciLifeLabs in Uppsala to connect on topics of mutual interest.
It was fantastic to renew existing connections and meet international partners like NBIS in person. One highlight was the crossover in our efforts to better support omics data management at a national level, and researchers’ omics data submissions to international repositories.