ELIXIR at the Year’s Largest Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Event – ISMB/ECCB 2025 in Liverpool

From 20 to 24 July 2025, Liverpool, United Kingdom, hosted the joint conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) / European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB), one of the largest and most significant international gatherings in bioinformatics and computational biology, where scientists, infrastructure providers, industry leaders, and policymakers exchange knowledge, showcase innovation, and shape the future of the field.

This year, the event drew more than 2,160 in-person participants, including three from Latvia’s Riga Stradiņš University (RSU), as well as nearly 230 online attendees from 70 countries, setting a new record for engagement. The programme featured keynote lectures from internationally recognised scientists, in-depth tutorials, and focused sessions covering topics from artificial intelligence in life sciences to large-scale human genomics, microbiome research, biodiversity, and translational medicine.

One of the principal supporters and an active participant of ISMB/ECCB is ELIXIR – the European Life Sciences Infrastructure for Biological Information, an intergovernmental consortium uniting more than 250 research institutes across 22 Member States. Its mission is to enable and advance data-intensive research in the Life Sciences, spanning bioinformatics, systems biology, precision medicine, agriculture, and environmental sciences. This year’s programme featured the joint National Institutes of Health (NIH)–ELIXIR session, BioData Resources – Evolution and Innovation, which explored how global biodata infrastructures can balance long-term stability with cutting-edge innovation. The session brought together international experts to discuss semantic data frameworks, scalable infrastructure, sustainable funding models, and methods for measuring impact. A highlight was the presentation of MGnify, one of ELIXIR’s Core Data Resources, as a world-class example of metagenomics infrastructure, alongside ELIXIR’s leadership in hybrid cloud solutions, open-source bioinformatics tools, and FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability) practices.

As previously reported, on 1 June 2025, Riga Stradiņš University (RSU) launched the project RSU Participation in the Horizon Europe Programme (project No. 1.1.1.5/3/25/I/014), which includes implementing one of the new Latvian National Partnership and Action Plans under the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) / European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) framework — the integration of Latvia into ELIXIR.

"RSU Participation in the Horizon Europe Programme" (project No 1.1.1.5/3/25/I/014).