The Third Annual Meeting of the European Virus Bioinformatics Center

Abstract

The Third Annual Meeting of the European Virus Bioinformatics Center (EVBC) took place in Glasgow, United Kingdom, 28–29 March 2019. Virus bioinformatics has become central to virology research, and advances in bioinformatics have led to improved approaches to investigate viral infections and outbreaks, being successfully used to detect, control, and treat infections of humans and animals. This active field of research has attracted approximately 110 experts in virology and bioinformatics/computational biology from Europe and other parts of the world to attend the two-day meeting in Glasgow to increase scientific exchange between laboratory- and computer-based researchers. The meeting was held at the McIntyre Building of the University of Glasgow; a perfect location, as it was originally built to be a place for “rubbing your brains with those of other people”, as Rector Stanley Baldwin described it. The goal of the meeting was to provide a meaningful and interactive scientific environment to promote discussion and collaboration and to inspire and suggest new research directions and questions. The meeting featured eight invited and twelve contributed talks, on the four main topics: (1) systems virology, (2) virus-host interactions and the virome, (3) virus classification and evolution and (4) epidemiology, surveillance and evolution. Further, the meeting featured 34 oral poster presentations, all of which focused on specific areas of virus bioinformatics. This report summarizes the main research findings and highlights presented at the meeting.

Women in the European Virus Bioinformatics Center

“…Over the years, the meeting developed from an annual get-together of the EVBC to an international conference far beyond the members of the EVBC. In 2019, a selection process for contributed submissions was included to open-up the scientific program [ 5 ] and the number of high-quality submissions is increasing every year. In 2020, the pandemic has made us even more aware of the importance of accelerating research in viral bioinformatics.…”

“…Franziska is organizing the viruses in silico lecture series, partly organizing the ECR Viromics Webinar Series and taking care of the EVBC workshop program. She is organizing joint publications by EVBC members [ 4 , 23 , 24 ], including the conference reports [ 5 , 6 , 8 ]. She coordinated the grant application for VIROINF.…”

“…Stefanie has been a founding member of the EVBC. She was an invited speaker at the annual conference in 2019 in Glasgow [ 5 ].…”

ITN—VIROINF: Understanding (Harmful) Virus-Host Interactions by Linking Virology and Bioinformatics

“…The interactions between the members resulted in the identification of a broad range of opportunities for collaboration between the research groups. In order to create a framework for collaboration between these research groups we propose the implementation of the VIROINF ITN [ 1 , 2 ]. The research training programme tackles major bioinformatical and virological challenges: the power of new genome sequencing technologies, associated with new tools to handle “big data”, provide unprecedented opportunities to address fundamental questions in virology.…”

The International Virus Bioinformatics Meeting 2020

“…The EVBC was founded in 2017 to bring together experts in virology and virus bioinformatics [1,2] and is constantly growing. Since the last annual meeting in March 2019 [4], 27 new members from 14 different countries joined the EVBC. In addition, after the conference, all speakers have been invited to join the EVBC; eight speakers followed this invitation.…”