• Daniel Rice, Daniel Rice, EMBL-EBI

The Universal Protein Resource (UniProt) is a cornerstone of molecular biology and bioinformatics, delivering high-quality, freely accessible protein sequence and functional information for over 20 years. This session presents a guided tour of UniProt’s latest features, datasets, and tools, reflecting its continued evolution to meet the needs of the scientific community.

We will highlight data integrations—including AlphaFold structural predictions, AlphaMissense variant effect predictions, RNA editing, post-translational modifications (PTMs), and Human Proteome Project (HPP) datasets—and demonstrate embedded visualizations developed by UniProt and third-party contributors. Attendees will learn about improved tools for browsing, analyzing, and exporting data, along with recent enhancements to UniProt’s API and new Swagger documentation that streamline programmatic access and data integration.

Whether you're a student or a seasoned researcher, this session will help you better leverage UniProt in your work. We will emphasize practical applications and encourage engagement with UniProt’s expanding capabilities. Attendees will leave with a deeper understanding of how to integrate UniProt resources into their workflows—and how to contribute feedback to guide its future development.

• Sumaiya Iqbal, Sumaiya Iqbal, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
• Jordan Safer, Jordan Safer, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard

Recent advances in AI-based methods have revolutionized the field of structural biology. Concomitantly, high-throughput sequencing and functional genomics have generated genetic variants at an unprecedented scale. However, efficient tools and resources are needed to link disparate data types – to “map” variants onto protein structures, to better understand how the variation causes disease, and thereby design therapeutics. Here we present the Genomics 2 Proteins Portal (G2P; g2p.broadinstitute.org): a human proteome-wide resource that maps 49,500,857 genetic variants onto 42,481 protein sequences and 84,318 structures (according to Dec 2024 release), with a comprehensive set of structural and functional features. Additionally, the G2P portal allows users to interactively upload protein residue-wise annotations (variants, scores, etc.) as well as the protein structure beyond databases to establish the connection between genomics to proteins. The portal serves as an easy-to-use discovery tool for researchers and scientists to hypothesize the structure-function relationship between natural or synthetic variations and their molecular phenotypes.

• Patrick Gohl, Patrick Gohl, Universitat Pompeu Fabra
• Patricia Bota, Patricia Bota, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

ModCRE is a web server using a structural approach to predict Transcription Factor binding preferences and auto-mate modelling of higher order regulatory complexes with DNA.

• Tuomas Borman, Tuomas Borman, University of Turku
• Leo Lahti, Leo Lahti, University of Turku

Microbes play a crucial role in human health, disease, and the environment. Despite their significant impact, the mechanisms underlying microbiome interactions remain largely unknown due to their complexity. While microbiome research has heavily relied on sequencing data, understanding these interactions requires multi-omics approaches and computational methods.

R/Bioconductor is a well-established platform for biological data analysis, providing high-quality, open-source software. It is driven by a global community of researchers who collaborate through software development, shared standards, and active forums. The software is built on standardized data containers, with SummarizedExperiment being the most widely used, adopted across a wide range of biological fields. Shared data containers enable interoperability and facilitate advanced data integration.

This session will showcase Bioconductor tools for microbiome data science, with a particular focus on the mia (Microbiome Analysis) framework through a practical case study. By the end of the session, participants will gain insights into the latest advances in microbiome research within Bioconductor, including TreeSummarizedExperiment data container along with essential methods. They will also be prepared to further explore the data science ecosystem, supported by the online book Orchestrating Microbiome Analysis with Bioconductor.

• Meya Brian, Meya Brian, Freelance

Access to quality healthcare remains a persistent challenge in marginalized regions
such as Turkana County in northern Kenya, where traditional beliefs, nomadic
lifestyles, and weak infrastructure significantly hinder health service delivery and
uptake, particularly in chronic disease management and drug adherence. This proposal
introduces an innovative solution: culturally embedded Internet of Things (IoT)
technology in the form of Smart Turkana Beads—a wearable health-monitoring
device seamlessly integrated into the community’s traditional attire to enhance health
surveillance and promote drug adherence. Leveraging Indigenous Knowledge
Systems (IKS), the project seeks to reduce the cultural dissonance typically
encountered by conventional biomedical technologies, while addressing key barriers
to healthcare access in a way that aligns with local values and practices (Mwakalinga
et al., 2021)

• Daniel Fabian, Daniel Fabian, Lonza

Optimizing the biomanufacturing of therapeutic molecules, such as monoclonal antibodies, is critical for delivering efficient and scalable patient treatment. A key early step in this production pipeline is the development of Chinese Hamster Ovary (CHO) cell lines that produce these biologic molecules. To address the rising demand for therapeutic biologics, it is essential to enhance cell line expression to achieve consistently high and stable product titers. Lonza has recently integrated nanopore long-read sequencing into its multiomics pipelines, providing unprecedented molecular insights into the genetic and epigenetic landscapes of CHO cell lines, advancing both genetic engineering and biomarker discovery. This presentation will highlight recent progress in improving omics data accuracy through de novo genome assembly, and the integration of nanopore whole genome sequencing and DNA methylation analysis with other next-generation sequencing technologies.

• Harry Allsopp

• Stephen Williams

10x Genomics will present a comprehensive overview of our cutting-edge technologies: Visium for spatial transcriptomics, Chromium for single-cell analysis, and Xenium for in situ analysis. The talk will delve into the foundational principles of each platform, highlighting their unique capabilities in advancing biological discovery. Attendees will gain insight into how these technologies enable researchers to explore biological systems at unprecedented resolution, from whole tissue sections to individual cells and subcellular localization.
The presentation will also cover the robust software ecosystem surrounding 10x Genomics assays, including both 10x developed software and widely used third-party tools for data analysis and visualization. Furthermore, the talk will address current challenges in analyzing complex data, alongside exciting opportunities for novel software and algorithm development with 10x datasets. We hope to inspire attendees to unlock deeper biological insights from the vast amounts of data generated by all 10x Genomics platforms.