BioData.pt | ELIXIR Portugal is taking on significant leadership responsibilities across two newly launched ELIXIR projects, with members of the Portuguese node leading work packages in research data management, metadata standardisation, and structural biology.
Under ELIXIR's Biodiversity, Food Security and Pathogens (BFSP) programme, Teresa Nogueira leads two work packages. In Work Package 7, BioData.pt leads the pilot implementation of harmonised FAIR metadata templates for non-human pathogen genomic and phenotypic data — an area where standards have long lagged behind their human pathogen counterparts, posing a significant barrier to One Health research. In Work Package 9, FAIRferm, the Portuguese node leads the development of reproducible FAIR-compliant workflows for time-series microbiome and metabolomics analysis of plant-based food fermentation data, contributing tools to be made available via the ELIXIR Toolbox and Galaxy platforms.
Within ELIXIR's Cellular and Molecular Research programme, Ana M. Melo leads Work Package 8, FRET-IDP Community Resource, which will build the first dedicated public registry for FRET data on intrinsically disordered proteins — molecules implicated in diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and cancer. BioData.pt leads the data gathering and curation activity and the dissemination and training efforts, working alongside ELIXIR nodes in Hungary and Italy to deliver a FAIR-compliant registry interoperable with existing IDP resources including DisProt, MobiDB, and PED.
This continued success builds on BioData.pt's track record in securing ELIXIR-commissioned work. Last year, also under the Cellular and Molecular Research programme, Oscar Dias and Miguel Rocha (University of Minho) are part of the Work Package 3, DBTLHub, working towards connecting databases, datasets, and tools supporting the Design-Build-Test-Learn cycle in biotechnology and biomanufacturing. Under the Human Data and Translational Research programme, Ana Teresa Freitas, Jorge Oliveira, and Jorge Silva (University of Aveiro) were also awarded two projects: FAIR-FEGA, focused on accelerating high-quality FAIR data deposition in the Federated European Genome-Phenome Archive, and a federated learning project leveraging RO-Crates for human genomic data analysis and provenance tracking.