The BioHackathon Europe 2024, organized by ELIXIR Europe, took place from November 4 to 8, 2024, at the Belloch Campus in Catalonia. This international collaborative event brought together 180 on-site participants—researchers, bioinformaticians, and developers—as well as 140 virtual attendees, to work on 30 projects aimed at tackling research challenges in bioinformatics. This annual hackathon serves as a project accelerator for innovations in areas such as data integration, data science, and the application of FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable). During the event, participants implement their ideas through intensive coding sessions.

Events like this enable projects to generate new developments (integration of prototypes, proof of concept proposals, or drafts to production), test new versions, gather insights for new features, reach new users, and receive expert feedback across various fields.

The 2024 edition focused on several strategic projects, with significant involvement from members of the French Institute of Bioinformatics (IFB). Bérénice Batut and Claire Rioualen submitted two projects that were selected as part of the 30 working projects for this BioHackathon :

• Project 11 - Galaxy CoDex, by Bérénice Batut and Wendy Bacon: This project aims to enhance the sustainability and resource management of Galaxy communities through the development of the Galaxy Communities Dock ("Galaxy Codex"). It involves improving and implementing web page models and files that allow domain communities to effectively gather, organize, integrate, and deploy relevant tools, workflows, and training materials across various Galaxy servers. Concurrently, better resource annotation practices will be developed and integrated at different levels of the Galaxy ecosystem. The goal is to make Galaxy resources more accessible and better organized for users and researchers working with microbial data.

GitHub link for Project 11

• Project 27 - Integration of Bioconductor Packages with ELIXIR, by Claire Rioualen and Maria Doyle (Ireland): This project aims to enhance the ELIXIR research software ecosystem (RSEc) by improving over 2,000 Bioconductor packages according to FAIR principles and synchronizing them with the bio.tools registry. The project seeks to enhance the EDAM ontology by applying the standard to the vast Bioconductor ecosystem. Structured integration processes and community-centered development are used to achieve these objectives. It aligns with the goals of the ELIXIR 2024-26 program through the standardization of Bioconductor software metadata, their inclusion in the RSEc infrastructure, and the community enhancement of EDAM (tools platform WP2 and WP3).

Maria and I met during a coffee break at the BioHackathon 2023, and our conversation eventually turned into a whole collaboration between the EDAM group and the Bioconductor community! Based on a 2-year roadmap and funding from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) granted to the Bioconductor organization, it kick-started at the BioHackathon Europe 2024. Our project gathered a total of 12 contributors, some attending the event in person and some participating virtually. We are very happy with the enthusiasm and wealth of ideas we shared together, and foresee a very promising future to our collaboration ! 

Claire Rioualen from project 27

GitHub link for Project 27