The IPB has once again been recognized for its exemplary actions in terms of equal opportunity-oriented personnel and organizational policies and has received the TOTAL E-QUALITY certification for the…
The Plant Science Student Conference (PSSC) has been organised by students from the two Leibniz institutes, IPK and IPB, every year for the last 20 years. In this interview, Christina Wäsch (IPK) and…
Toxicology has been an active research field for many decades, with academic, industrial and government involvement. Modern omics and computational approaches are changing the field, from merely disease-specific observational models into target-specific predictive models. Traditionally, toxicology has strong links with other fields such as biology, chemistry, pharmacology, and medicine. With the rise of synthetic and new engineered materials, alongside ongoing prioritisation needs in chemical risk assessment for existing chemicals, early predictive evaluations are becoming of utmost importance to both scientific and regulatory purposes. ELIXIR is an intergovernmental organisation that brings together life science resources from across Europe. To coordinate the linkage of various life science efforts around modern predictive toxicology, the establishment of a new ELIXIR Community is seen as instrumental. In the past few years, joint efforts, building on incidental overlap, have been piloted in the context of ELIXIR. For example, the EU-ToxRisk, diXa, HeCaToS, transQST, and the nanotoxicology community have worked with the ELIXIR TeSS, Bioschemas, and Compute Platforms and activities. In 2018, a core group of interested parties wrote a proposal, outlining a sketch of what this new ELIXIR Toxicology Community would look like. A recent workshop (held September 30th to October 1st, 2020) extended this into an ELIXIR Toxicology roadmap and a shortlist of limited investment-high gain collaborations to give body to this new community. This Whitepaper outlines the results of these efforts and defines our vision of the ELIXIR Toxicology Community and how it complements other ELIXIR activities.
Publications
van Rijswijk, M.; Beirnaert, C.; Caron, C.; Cascante, M.; Dominguez, V.; Dunn, W. B.; Ebbels, T. M. D.; Giacomoni, F.; Gonzalez-Beltran, A.; Hankemeier, T.; Haug, K.; Izquierdo-Garcia, J. L.; Jimenez, R. C.; Jourdan, F.; Kale, N.; Klapa, M. I.; Kohlbacher, O.; Koort, K.; Kultima, K.; Le Corguillé, G.; Moreno, P.; Moschonas, N. K.; Neumann, S.; O’Donovan, C.; Reczko, M.; Rocca-Serra, P.; Rosato, A.; Salek, R. M.; Sansone, S.-A.; Satagopam, V.; Schober, D.; Shimmo, R.; Spicer, R. A.; Spjuth, O.; Thévenot, E. A.; Viant, M. R.; Weber, R. J. M.; Willighagen, E. L.; Zanetti, G.; Steinbeck, C.;The future of metabolomics in ELIXIRF1000Research61649(2017)DOI: 10.12688/f1000research.12342.2
Metabolomics, the youngest of the major omics technologies, is supported by an active community of researchers and infrastructure developers across Europe. To coordinate and focus efforts around infrastructure building for metabolomics within Europe, a workshop on the “Future of metabolomics in ELIXIR” was organised at Frankfurt Airport in Germany. This one-day strategic workshop involved representatives of ELIXIR Nodes, members of the PhenoMeNal consortium developing an e-infrastructure that supports workflow-based metabolomics analysis pipelines, and experts from the international metabolomics community. The workshop established metabolite identification as the critical area, where a maximal impact of computational metabolomics and data management on other fields could be achieved. In particular, the existing four ELIXIR Use Cases, where the metabolomics community - both industry and academia - would benefit most, and which could be exhaustively mapped onto the current five ELIXIR Platforms were discussed. This opinion article is a call for support for a new ELIXIR metabolomics Use Case, which aligns with and complements the existing and planned ELIXIR Platforms and Use Cases.