Bioinform at BioHackathon Europe 2022

Our Bioinforming project will take part in the upcoming BioHackathon Europe 2022. The event will take place in Paris from the 7th to the 11th of November and will host 35 projects.

The BioHackathon Europe is a regular event organized by ELIXIR Europe that started in 2018. Teams of researchers merge efforts to tackle different problems and collaborate in engaging projects in a non-competitive setting.

The goals of the BioHackathon Europe are:

• Advance the development of an open-source infrastructure for data integration to accelerate scientific innovation. The focus is on technology implementations such as FAIR, identifiers, metadata standards, ontologies and metadata catalogues that support the operations across ELIXIR Platforms, Communities and Focus Groups.
• Engage technical people in the bioinformatics community inside and outside ELIXIR to work together on topics of common interest aligned to ELIXIR activities.
• Strengthen the interactions with ELIXIR Platforms, Communities and Focus Groups to establish and reinforce collaborations through hands-on programming activities.

Project Abstract: Our project (Bioinforming) focuses on designing a five-day training school in Bioinformatics, tailored to each of three different target groups of young students. Additionally, a practical example of a real training school will be presented as a use case. The envisaged training schools will be designed as five-day-long introductory courses in Bioinformatics, with a focus on protein sequence and structure. We identified three target groups that will have a dedicated training school according to their background: 1) high school students; 2) undergraduate students in Biology or related degrees; 3) bachelor students in Computer Science. During the biohackathon, we will determine the learning goals and learning objectives of each specific target group. Moreover, we will highlight what an ideal program should contain and we will define the associated activity and assessment plans. An ideal training school should present overviews of Erasmus+ mobility opportunities and FAIR principles (especially for undergraduate students), but also raise awareness of biodiversity loss and gender inequality in science. The ELIXIR Training Platform will be used as a material source for the training schools’ content creation. We also aim to actively contribute to the expansion of the platform during the biohackathon and afterwards. In particular, we will generate open-source and FAIRifyed teaching content and materials.

We consider the Elixir’s biohackathon as an opportunity to expand our format in Europe, improve the contents of the training schools and increase our collaboration network with other researchers involved in training and education.