The Australian Outpost of BioHackathon Europe is a unique opportunity to participate in a significant global event and network with international peers while working intensively on practical bioinformatics challenges. ELIXIR’s BioHackathon runs from 3 - 7 November 2025, with the Aussie Outpost working asynchronously in our business hours (mostly) in Melbourne plus some work in the early evening to facilitate linking up live with the team in Berlin.

If you don’t live in Melbourne, BioCommons will cover the cost of your flights, food and accommodation. We always make it fun, and you’ll get to know others from around Australia while you learn new skills.

The Australian Outpost of the BioHackathon will focus on a selection of projects:

• Automatic workflow for benchmarking BUSCO genes for phylogenomics

• Streamlining FAIR Metadata for Biodiversity Genome Annotations

• Expanding the Benchmarking Landscape for Long-Read-Transcriptomics including Novel Datasets and Pipelines

• METRICS - Monitoring of Key Performance Indicators for ELIXIR Services

The hackathon aims to:

• Advance the development of an open source infrastructure for data integration to accelerate scientific innovation

• Engage technical people in the bioinformatics community to work together on topics of common interest

• Strengthen interactions, establish and reinforce collaborations through hands-on programming activities.

You can read the wrap up and a participant’s blog post from a previous year’s event.

Please contact us if you are interested in joining the Australian Outpost of the BioHackathon Europe, and tell us which project/s you would like to participate in, and why. There’s no need to register directly for a place on the BioHackathon Europe website yet.

Please submit your expression of interest to comms@biocommons.org.au by 5 Sep 2025.