7th Central German Meeting on Bioinformatics attracts more than 170 participants

de.NBI Service Registration Platform launched

New Associated Partners in the de.NBI Network

Trimmomatic v0.40: A gold-standard NGS tool celebrates a decade with a major update

Call for Projects: 5th BioHackathon Germany

  News from ELIXIR

Broad Contributions from de.NBI & ELIXIR Germany at ELIXIR All Hands 2026
The ELIXIR All Hands Meeting 2026 brought together the European ELIXIR community in Lyon, France, to exchange ideas, showcase achievements, and discuss future developments in life science data, tools, training, and infrastructure. The de.NBI & ELIXIR Germany delegation consisted of 37 participants, chairing eight workshops and two mini symposia along with numerous talks on topics including Impact assessment and KPIs, health and research data, AI and life science training, federated compute infrastructures, community engagement, leadership, and diversity initiatives. In addition, the German node showcased its activities through 15 poster presentations. The meeting provided valuable opportunities for collaboration and networking across the ELIXIR community. We thank the organisers and all participants for an inspiring and productive event.

ELIXIR Board begins recruitment process for the next Director
On 22 April 2026, Alexander Goesmann, Chair of the ELIXIR Board, announced that ELIXIR Director Tim Hubbard will not seek an extension beyond the end of his current contract in February 2028. Following his recommendation, the Board has initiated the recruitment process to ensure that the successful candidate can contribute to shaping the 2029–2033 ELIXIR Scientific Programme. 
Read the full statement on the ELIXIR website.

Latvia and Poland become ELIXIR Observer Countries
The ELIXIR Board approved Latvia and Poland as Observer countries on 15 April 2026, welcoming both nations' bioinformatics communitiews into closer with the ELIXIR network. Observer ststus is a stepping stone towards full membership, eanbling stronger ties between national bioinformatics communities and established ELIXIR Nodes.
ELIXIR now comprises 23 member states and EMBL, plus four observer countries: Latvia, Poland, Croatia, and Austria. Read the full announcement here.

News from de.NBI and ELIXIR-DE Office

SAB meeting 2026 and launch of de.NBI strategy process

The de.NBI Scientific Advisory Board met in Frankfurt on 17–18 March 2026 to discuss recent developments and future prospects of the network. The SAB was impressed by the services, training efforts, cloud infrastructure and usage statistics, as well as the extensive engagement within ELIXIR. The network received valuable suggestions for its future development. Furthermore, de.NBI is currently undergoing a strategic development process involving representatives from across the network and supported by an external consultancy firm. The SAB was presented with the initial findings and provided suggestions that will be incorporated into the ongoing process, which aims to define priorities and strengthen de.NBI's position within the German and European bioinformatics landscape over the next 5–10 years. 

Increasing visibility for de.NBI services and activities

The de.NBI communication activities continue to expand. The LinkedIn channel now reaches around 1,950 followers and generates approximately 7,000–8,000 impressions per month. In addition to news, events, publications, and job advertisements, a new initiative aims to regularly highlight de.NBI services and their impact on research.
Network members are encouraged to share success stories, publications, service updates, and community activities with the Administration Office for promotion through de.NBI communication channels.

For all de.NBI members: Join OSIRIS – Create Your de.NBI & ELIXIR-DE Profile

Who is who in de.NBI & ELIXIR-DE? To help identify expertise and affiliation with network and activities across initiatives such as NFDI, ELIXIR, and EOSC, OSIRIS has been adopted as the central research information system for internal use in the de.NBI & ELIXIR-DE network. Launched at the All Hands Meeting 2025, the platform already counts 100+ registered members.

If you have not yet registered, please create your account. To obtain the required token please contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Profiles are visible only to registered members.

  News on the de.NBI Cloud

• EOSC United project: 
  • Successful deployment of SimpleVM control stack on EOSC EU Node (EEN) - enabling to select EEN as a destination for SimpleVM projects
  • Successful deployment of WESKit - part of the ELIXIR-on-Cloud stack on the EOSC EU Node
• Planned talks and workshop:
  • A SimpleVM Workshop with a Metagenomics Use Case is to be held at GCB 2026
  • The de.NBI Cloud will be present at the EGI 2026 in Gent, with a talk about de.NBI and a demonstration of SimpleVM.  

Current figures on the de.NBI Cloud:

At the ELIXIR All Hands Meeting 2026 in Lyon, Sanjay Kumar Srikakulam presented the poster "From Containers to AI: Enabling Reproducible Life Science Workflows on de.NBI Cloud". The contribution highlighted two new services developed within the de.NBI Cloud Federation: a scalable OCI registry for secure and reproducible distribution of containers and scientific software, and an OpenAI-compatible service providing access to hosted large language models within the de.NBI Cloud infrastructure.
Together, these services support the development of secure, reproducible, and AI-enhanced life science workflows while aligning with European infrastructure initiatives such as ELIXIR and EOSC.

News on de.NBI Services

• SeqAn: New releases SeqAn 3.4.2 and 2.5.3 are now available, providing bug fixes, performance improvements, and continued support for modern sequence analysis workflows.
• OpenMS: Continued development of OpenMS and mzPeak, a next-generation Parquet-based mass spectrometry data format designed for compact storage, efficient querying, and improved interoperability of MS data.
• LPSN: LPSN has introduced DOI-based versioning to improve traceability, reproducibility, and citation of nomenclature data.
• BacDive: BacDive released API v2 together with updated documentation and expanded programmatic access options for microbial strain metadata.
• SABIO-RK: The new SABIO-RK NextGen implementation is now available for community feedback and testing.
• ProteinsPlus: ProteinsPlus integrated the new ActivityFinder tool and migrated to upgraded infrastructure, improving reliability, security, and access to protein structure analysis services.

Recent Publications by de.NBI partners

• Gutermuth T, Ehmki ESR, ..., Rarey M. Enabling Automatic Generation of Protein-Ligand Complex Data Sets with Atomistic Detail. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. 2026 May 25. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.6c00150
• Hyde CJ, Syme A, ..., Zierep PF, et al. Community-curated Galaxy interfaces with the Galaxy Labs Engine. GigaScience. 2026 Apr 08. https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giag041
• Ehmki ESR, Gutermuth T, ..., Rarey M. ActivityFinder: Toward the Fully Automatic Integration of Structural and Binding Affinity Data. Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling. 2026 Jan 26. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.5c02505
• Tello-Ruiz MK, Cezard T, ..., Beier S, et al.  Adoption of Standard Reference SNP Identifiers in Agricultural Genomics for Interoperability and Data Reuse. Scientific Data. 2026 Apr 16. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07208-0
• Heuermann MC, Barros P, Beier S, Gundlach H, ..., Scholz U et al. White paper: standards for handling and analyzing plant pan-genomes. F1000Research. 2025 Jan 01. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.166538.3
• Feser M, Arend D, Beier S, Bolger M, Lübke NC, ..., Usadel B, Scholz U. Evolving bioinformatics services – the journey of KPI metrics with Scorpion. Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics. 2026 May 18. https://doi.org/10.1515/jib-2025-0048
• Beier S, Bolger AM, Bolger ME, Schwacke R, Usadel B. Trimmomatic: a decade of feature-rich, high-performance NGS read preprocessing. Bioinformatics. 2026 Jun 01. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btag331
• Holst F, Bolger AM, ..., Usadel B, Schwacke R, Bolger ME, Denton AK. Helixer: ab initio prediction of primary eukaryotic gene models combining deep learning and a hidden Markov model. Nature Methods. 2026 Apr 01. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-025-02939-1
• Jentsch M, Polemiti E, ..., Eils R, ...,Twardziok S, Schumann G. CLUES: A Comprehensive Workflow for Integrating Geospatial Data in Biomedical Research. Nature Communications. 2026 May 13. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73048-6
• Versnjak J, Kuehne T, ..., Eils R, Kelm M. Deep phenotyping of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction through multi-omics integration. European Journal of Heart Failure. 2025 Dec 01. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejhf.70041
• Cosenza MR, Gaiatto A, ..., Korbel JO. Origins of chromosome instability unveiled by coupled imaging and genomics. Nature. 2025 Dec 01. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09632-5
• Wang W, Hariharan M, ..., Müller F, Ecker JR. Genetics and environment distinctively shape the human immune cell epigenome. Nature Genetics. 2026 Feb 01. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-025-02479-6
• Schneider-Lunitz V, Kensche PR, Kraatz L, ..., Eils R, Buchhalter I, Twardziok SO. Managing workflow executions with WESkit. Bioinformatics. 2026 Feb 28. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btag091
• The Galaxy Community. Galaxy for accessible, reproducible, and collaborative data analyses: 2026 update. Nucleic Acids Research. 2026 Jun 09. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkag469

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The de.NBI Quarterly Newsletter is a service of de.NBI - German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure for members, partners and interested public. All photos are copyright of the de.NBI administration office unless marked otherwise.