News

The BMD team took part in BioHackathon Europe 2025, which was held in Berlin from 3 to 7 November and organised by ELIXIR Europe. This annual event brings together bioinformaticians and computational biologists for an intensive week of collaborative coding on community-driven projects.

BMD partners Niels Billiet and Mathias Dillen from Meise Botanic Garden, together with Robert Waterhouse from the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, joined colleagues from around the world to work together on topics of common interest.

Among the 31 projects selected by the Programme Committee for the 2025 edition was “From sequence to citation”, led by the BMD partners. The project was presented by Mathias Dillen, who described a workflow designed to trace how molecular biodiversity data from the International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration, now accessible through GBIF, are used and cited in scientific research. 

The workflow links INSDC-sourced GBIF datasets to publications citing GBIF downloads, compiles key metadata via the GBIF Literature API, and analyses patterns of data use across time, geography, and research themes. It also evaluates the conservation relevance of these datasets by identifying occurrences of the IUCN Red List of threatened species. 

By supporting reproducibility and policy integration, the workflow enhances the visibility and utility of molecular biodiversity data and contributes to the broader objectives of the BMD project.

Mathias Dillen and Niels Billiet at the event