SIB Community Days @ ECCB2026

Single-cell and spatial data FAIRification, community standards and training

SIB Community Days meeting at ECCB2026 - 2026, September 4th (Friday)

Registration

You can register to the event through this Google Form.

Summary

In recent years, single-cell and spatial transcriptomics has become a widely used technology to study heterogeneous and dynamic biological systems.
This workshop aims to bring together the ELIXIR Single-Cell Omics Community and the scFAIR consortium to align ongoing efforts, advance FAIR standards, and strengthen international collaboration around best practices and trainings in single-cell and spatial omics.

ELIXIR Single-Cell Omics Community

The event will provide updates on ongoing activities and collaborative projects, share progress from ELIXIR Nodes and initiatives, and discuss future priorities in single-cell and spatial omics. It will also include presentations, open discussions, and networking opportunities aimed at strengthening collaborations, welcoming new members, and fostering engagement with researchers and trainers interested in advancing single-cell and spatial omics within and beyond ELIXIR. More information about the community: https://elixir-europe.org/communities/single-cell-omics; https://www.singlecellomics.org/

FAIRification of single-cell data

The Deplancke and Robinson-Rechavi/Bastian SIB groups have together launched in 2023 the scFAIR consortium, for FAIRification of single-cell metadata, data exchange formats and platforms, reproducible worflows for single-cell analyses. The consortium includes members from other important international resources, such as CELLxGENE (funded by the Chan Zuckerber Initiative). The consortium meets once a month remotely to discuss, e.g., metadata schema, ontologies to use, shared annotation efforts of major datasets. This event is a perfect opportunity to gather participants face-to-face, to improve the consortium recommendations, underlying tools, and collaboration between international single-cell resources.

Date

2026.09.04 from 09:00 AM to 04:00 PM (Swiss time, CEST / GMT+2)

Location

CICG congress venue in Geneva

Programme

• 09:00 – 09:10: Introduction - General info
• 09:10 – 09:20: Presentation of the ELIXIR Single-Cell Omics community and connection to data standardization
• 09:20 – 10:20: Single-cell data and metadata standard for dataset deposition over multiple international resources
  • 09:20 – 09:40: The CELLxGENE and scFAIR resources
  • 09:40 - 10:00: The Single Cell Expression Atlas EBI portal
  • 10:00 - 10:20: The FAANG portal
  • 10:20 - 10:40: Open discussion about metadata schema and standards
• ☕10:40 – 11:00: Coffee break
• 11:00 – 11:30: Presentation of the scFAIR portal connecting resource
• 11:30 – 12:00: Data and metadata curation coordination
• 🍽️12:00 – 13:00: Lunch break
• 13:00 – 16:00: TBD - Afternoon agenda

Staff

Lecturers:

• Frédéric Bastian, Group Leader, UNIL, Lausanne, 🇨🇭 Switzerland
• Emily Clark, Genome Analysis Team Leader, EMBL-EBI, Cambridge, 🇬🇧 England
• Christina Ernst, Functional Genomics Team Leader, EMBL-EBI, Cambridge, 🇬🇧 England
• Vincent Gardeux, Senior Scientist, EPFL, Lausanne, 🇨🇭 Switzerland
• Georgios Gavriilidis, Senior Postdoctoral Fellow, Berlin Institute of Health, Berlin, 🇩🇪 Germany
• Eija Korpelainen, Training Coordinator, CSC - IT Center for Science, Espoo, 🇫🇮 Finland