November 2014InFocus November 2014December 2015

Best wishes,  The EMBnet Operational Board

Holiday greetingsEMBnet’s Operational Board wishes you all happy holidays and a successful 2016! 2015 was a year full of changes and new projects. We thank all who contributed their news to EMBnet.digest & to EMBnet.journal, & who supported the 27th AGM in Oeiras (PT). We wish EMBnet and its members much success in 2016, and look forward to hearing many new stories, such as those of 2015!

January to May 2015• The year began with a new EMBnet QuickGuide

from Véronique Giudicelli, Sofia Kossida and Marie-Paule Lefranc, on IMGT/Junction Analysis. January’s InFocus, by Gert Vriend et al., reported 1000 Databases for the Bioinformatician.

• In February, the collective, final achievements of the AllBio project were reported in the digest by Erik Bongcam-Rudloff and Andreas Gisel on behalf of the full consortium.

• In March, Lubos Klucar hosted the final SeqAhead meeting in Bratislava; Ignacio Enrique Sánchez also provided an InFocus report on the activities of Bioinformática Federal, BiFe, EMBnet in Argentina.

• April saw the release of EMBnet.journal vol. 20 and 20A, publication of the ELIXIR-GOBLET joint training strategy (by Terri Attwood and ELIXIR’s training coordinators), and a report from Lefranc and Kossida on IMGT’s past, present and future.

• In the May InFocus, Terri Attwood described the major achievements of GOBLET from 2012 to 2015, including news of its publications, workshops, surveys, activities with ISCB, and preparations for its 4th AGM, in Cape Town.

EMBnet wishes youa Happy New Year 2016!

Final SeqAhead meeting, Bratislava (SK)

AllBio consortium

November 2014InFocus November 2014December 2015

Best wishes,  The EMBnet Operational Board

June to December, 2015• June witnessed the EMBnet AGM2015, which

was hosted by Pedro Fernandes at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras (PT). Here, an important new investment strategy was launched, and a new Executive team was welcomed.

• Later, EMBnet updated its presence on social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter) and, of course, the official website – follow us!

• In July, Domenica D’Elia, EMBnet’s newly elected Secretary, presented highlights of the CNR Institute for Biomedical Technologies, EMBnet in Italy.

• The theme of August’s InFocus was the 1st Annual Danish Bioinformatics Conference, reported by Axel Thieffry; the event took place in Odense, organised by ELIXIR-Denmark.

• In September, SLU, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, hosted a visit from theChair of the African Union Commission, to whom Erik Bongcam-Rudloff outlined bioinformatics cooperation in Africa; and EMBnet’s contributions to Bioinformatics in Sri Lanka (e.g., implementing Bioinformatics MSc courses at IBMBB) was the theme of the InFocus by Kanchana Senanayake.

• The events of the NETTAB & IB 2015 symposium, held in Bari (IT), were featured in the October InFocus, written by Domenica D’Elia; here, EMBnet sponsored 10 participants for a two-day hands-on tutorial on detecting genomic variants in human diseases, and design and analysis of small-RNA-Seq experiments.

• In November, EMBnet welcomed Antonio Santovito as its new Editorial Assistant; Antonio introduced himself in the November digest, with details of his background, motivation and upcoming challenges, especially with the maintenance of EMBnet.journal.

EMBnet AGM2015

EMBnet AGM2015

Antonio Santovito