ELIXIR at One of the Year’s Most Important Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Events – ECCB 2026 in Geneva

From 31 August to 4 September 2026, Geneva, Switzerland, hosted the 25th European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB 2026), organised by SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics. ECCB is one of Europe’s leading international events in computational biology, where scientists, research-infrastructure providers, industry leaders and policymakers exchange knowledge, showcase innovation and help shape the field’s future. The three-day scientific programme, held from 31 August to 2 September, was followed on 3 September by tutorials, workshops and symposia, while a Communities Day concluded the event on 4 September.

The ECCB 2026 scientific programme was organised into eight main tracks: distinguished keynotes; genomics, epigenomics and genome editing; transcriptomics and gene regulation; proteins and structural biology; systems biology, multi-omics integration and modelling; biodiversity, sustainability and environmental bioinformatics; a special track; and a dedicated ELIXIR track.

Alongside the conference’s opening and closing sessions, the keynote programme explored ancient human migrations, the development of cell types and immune responses in large-scale data. The genomics track covered sequence alignment and variant discovery, genomic language models, cancer genomics, disease-risk modelling and privacy-preserving synthetic genomes. Proteins and structural biology encompassed structure and interaction prediction, proteomics data quality, generative protein, antibody and peptide design, molecular docking and pathogenic-variant assessment. Systems biology brought together multi-omics, single-cell and spatial-data integration with network, metabolic and patient-specific biomarker models, knowledge graphs and histopathology-image analysis.

Transcriptomics and gene regulation addressed spatial-transcriptomics methods, RNA splicing, modelling of chromatin loops and transcription-factor activity, single-cell time-series benchmarking and cell-fate trajectories. The biodiversity track connected human and environmental microbiome research—including large cohort studies examining associations between gut-microbiota patterns and long-term health outcomes—with metagenomics, coral-reef biodiversity, viral genomics and sustainable biological-data infrastructure. The special track examined industry and innovation, new frontiers in computational biology, women’s experiences in the field, entrepreneurship, career development, biodiversity and climate. 

ELIXIR—the European Life Sciences Infrastructure for Biological Information—is one of the main supporters and long-standing participants of the ECCB conference. A plenary session dedicated to ELIXIR, “Introducing the ELIXIR Program,” was complemented by a ten-session ELIXIR thematic track that addressed a wide range of current issues: the identification and analysis of genomic variants in a federated environment using the standards of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, GA4GH), the ELIXIR research software ecosystem, and AI-supported systems biology based on the principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR). The program also focused on human data and research tools, plant science and systems biology, data and software interoperability, training in the field of biodiversity, as well as data-driven innovations in healthcare.

Two representatives from Latvia, both from Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU), also participated in ECCB 2026 and presented a poster on FAIR-aligned computational workflows “Towards FAIR and Privacy-Preserving Synthetic Health Data: A Reproducible Pipeline for Generation and Evaluation”.

As previously reported, on 1 June 2025, Rīga Stradiņš University (RSU) launched the project “RSU Participation in the Horizon Europe Programme” (project No. 1.1.1.5/3/25/I/014). The project implements one of Latvia’s new National Partnership and Action Plans under the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI)/European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) framework: Latvia’s integration into ELIXIR. The participation of RSU representatives at ECCB 2026 connected this national trajectory directly with Europe’s computational biology community. As Latvia continues working towards establishing its future national ELIXIR Node, the conference demonstrated the scale and breadth of the scientific collaboration in which Latvia aims to participate more closely.