Communities day
The Communities day is an independent, community-driven satellite event of ECCB 2026, taking place on Friday 4 September 2026, at the conference venue.
This day is dedicated to SIB Resources, platforms, and projects, offering a space for SIB communities to meet, exchange, and showcase their work.
Independent satellite events are organized by SIB communities, including sessions on pathogen data platforms, the EPD 40th Anniversary, the ELIXIR FAIRification Workshop, Glycoinformatics meets immunoinformatics, and the ELIXIR Single-Cell Omics Community.
Links to the individual Communities Day events will be shared here. Please note that registrations are managed independently by each organizer and not through the ECCB registration system.
The Eukaryotic Promoter Database EPD's 40th anniversary symposium: Sunsetting and outlook to the future
Full day event - Room 4 (floor -1)
EPD is a biodata resource supporting promoter research, which was first released on machine-readable media in 1986 and has been actively maintained ever since then. The symposium will feature invited talks on a broad spectrum of topics related to gene regulation as well as expert discussions on the future of biodata resources. A special session will be devoted to the presentation and kick-off of a promoter prediction challenge.
Confirmed speakers:
- Philipp Bucher, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (Switzerland)
- Martha Bulyk, Harvard University (USA)
- Andrey Buyan, Institute of Protein Research, Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia)
- Christophe Dessimoz, Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (Switzerland)
- Sascha Duttke, Washington State University (USA)
- Vsevolod Makeev, Cancer Research UK, Manchester (United Kingdom)
- Julia Naas, Helmholtz Munich (Germany)
- Yaron Orenstein, Bar-Ilan University (Israel)
- Torrey Rhyne-Carrigg, University of California San Diego (USA)
- Alexander Stark, Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP), Vienna BioCenter (Austria)
- Bas van Steensel, Netherlands Cancer Institute (Netherlands)
Curious to know more? Discover all the details about the EPD Symposium here.
Registrations now closed
From FAIR principles to data pipelines: FAIRification and FAIR enabling resources at scale with ELIXIR Europe, GO-FAIR Foundation, CODATA and webby FDOs
Full day event - Room 1 & Room 2 (floor -1)
The FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles are widely endorsed, but many research projects still struggle to turn them into concrete, repeatable implementation steps that scale beyond a single dataset, tool, or team. This two-part workshop convenes experts and practitioners working on FAIR-enabling infrastructure to compare approaches and jointly draft a reference implementation aspiring to address the challenges of our time—be it in Biodiversity, AI & Health or beyond.
Confirmed speakers:
- Matti Heikkurinen, CODATA (Committee on Data of the International Science Council)
- Vassilios Ioannidis, SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics / Vital-IT (Switzerland)
- Nick Juty, The University of Manchester (United Kingdom)
- Barbara Magagna, GO-FAIR Foundation
- Wolmar Nyberg Åkerström, NBIS National Bioinformatics Infrastructure (Sweden)
Registrations now closed
Single-cell and spatial data FAIRification, community standards and training
Full day event - Plenary E & Plenary F (floor 3)
In recent years, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics have become widely used technologies to study heterogeneous and dynamic biological systems.
This workshop aims to bring together the ELIXIR Single-Cell Omics Community and the scFAIR international consortium led by SIB resources, to align ongoing efforts, advance FAIR standards, and strengthen international collaboration around best practices and training in single-cell and spatial omics.
Confirmed speakers:
- Frédéric Bastian, SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (Switzerland)
- Wen Chen, California Institute of Technology (United States)
- Christina Ernst, European Molecular Biology Laboratory EMBL-EBI (United Kingdom)
- Vincent Gardeux, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)
- Georgios Gavriilidis, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin / Berlin Institute of Health (Germany)
- Jason Hilton, Stanford University School of Medicine (United States)
- Garth Ilsley, European Molecular Biology Laboratory EMBL-EBI (United Kingdom)
- Sabrina Jagot, CNRS - IFB (France)
- Eija Korpelainen, CSC – IT Center for Science (Finland)
- Kevin Rue-Albrecht, University of Oxford (United Kingdom)
Registrations now closed
Glycoinformatics meets immunoinformatics
Full day event - Room 9 (floor 2)
While cross-talk between glycobiology and immunology is expanding, glycoinformatics and immunoinformatics advance in parallel. What would it take to mirror the growing interest in glycoimmunolgy in bioinformatics? What would be the more or less obvious steps toward bridging our respective glycoinformatics and immunoinformatics efforts?
We will start with introducing the field of glycoimmunology, highlight what glycoinformatics has to offer and interactively shape the stepping stones to address our questions.
Confirmed speakers:
- Kiyoko Aoki-Kinoshita (Soka University, Tokyo, Japan)
- Elisa Fadda (University of Southampton, UK)
- Heinz Laübli (Universitätsspital Basel and University of Basel)
Open Community Forum: ECCB Outbreak Tabletop Exercise
Full day event - Room 14 (floor 2)
Join us for a conversation aiming to understand the current workflows for pathogen data sharing, identifying gaps, and developing practical solutions to strengthen national and international preparedness. The Open Community Forum (OCF), hosted in partnership with the Pathogen Data Network (PDN), brings together people who generate, manage, analyze, share, and use pathogen data to identify challenges, exchange ideas, and strengthen connections with each other and the NIAID Bioinformatics Resource Centers (BRCs).
This free event does not require ECCB registration however we do ask that you use the link below to register. In the morning, we’ll run a unique Outbreak Tabletop Exercise: Researchers, clinicians, platform developers, data providers, educators, public officials, and other stakeholders are invited to participate in interactive fictional outbreak scenarios to identify bottlenecks, communication gaps, unmet data needs, and opportunities to improve how pathogen data are shared and used during an outbreak.
This is an experiment in community engagement and problem solving - not a test of participants or organizations. What we learn will help refine future exercises and ultimately strengthen how pathogen data resources serve their communities.
In the afternoon, stay for an Open Collaboration Forum with representatives of PDN and the other NIAID Bioinformatics Resource Centers which are actively developing novel methods for analyzing and sharing infectious disease information. Meet resource teams, learn more about the BRCs, share your own work, and explore opportunities for collaboration.