ELIXIR Estonia’s July to December 2025 Highlights

In the second half of 2025, ELIXIR Estonia continued to deepen its collaborations in research data management, both within Estonia and across Europe, while also expanding staff involvement in training activities and knowledge-sharing initiatives. Throughout the period, we placed a stronger focus on data management by participating in and organising events in partnership. A standout moment was co-organising a Nordic Computational Biology Week Conference, an experience that will help us take on larger events in the future. Alongside these activities, our team contributed three new publications, reflecting our ongoing commitment to advancing research and supporting the broader scientific community.

ELIXIR Estonia news

Our website has gotten a couple of updates. The significant change is to the landing page, where (at the bottom of the page) you can now see all external courses and materials. This information used to be located under the News section, but is now more easily distinguishable from our other News items and our course information.
We have 3 new ELIXIR-GOBLET Train the Trainer alumni: Marilin Moor, Uku Raudvere, and Erik Jaaniso.
ELIXIR Estonia attended our institute’s UniTartuCS Day, where we were offering 4 topics for the students’ theses.
Professor Jaak Vilo, former Head of ELIXIR Estonia, was elected again as head of the Institute of Computer Science at the University of Tartu.

This autumn, ELIXIR Estonia highlighted data management topics and practices through Data Horror Stories. We shared some of the stories in our social media accounts, and we had a small board with different Data Horror Stories up in our institute. The event concluded in December with a PhD seminar on the same subjects.
We started a new blog series in which we will recommend useful textbooks and materials. The first blog post about a textbook, “An Intuitive Primer on Effective Functional Genomics Study Design” by Yoav Gilad, has been published.
Our Training Coordinator, Diana, and our Technical Coordinator, Uku, participated in the AI competence day “AI at the university. Vision, ethics and practice” at the University of Tartu on 22.09. They conducted a workshop (materials in Estonian), where they introduced the Google Colab data visualisation tool.
The GDI team developed a mini-node solution and shared deployment notes with other European GDI partners to help less advanced nodes achieve the required technical readiness stage.

Strengthening International Collaborations

ELIXIR Estonia co-organised the “Nordic Computational Biology conference Finland + Estonia” in Tallinn, 23-24 October. The event was co-organised by Heleri, our data manager, Kairi Koort, our deputy Head of Node, and Ahmed Mohamed from the University of Eastern Finland.
Additionally, our Technical Coordinator, Uku, gave a presentation titled “Tending Garden: The Hidden Work Behind Research Software”.
Heleri represented our data management team in the ELIXIR RDM Community F2F and DATAREX Project meeting in Ghent, 22-24 Sept.
Diana presented at the National Library of Latvia conference “Support for the use of data in research: governance, curators, infrastructure” in Riga on 10 Oct, sharing Estonia’s insights and plans.
Erik Jaaniso, Kersti Jääger, Karl-Martin Voovere and Martti Tamm, together with the Estonian Biobank representative Priit Kleemann, attended the 4th GDI Pillar II technical workshop in Paris, October 15th-17th, where they were engaged in defining the achievable technical outcome of GDI and building stronger collaboration between GDI and Genome of Europe projects.
Four of our team members participated in the Biohackathon Europe 2025, two online and two on-site.
Heleri participated in Project 2, “Advancing the ELIXIR Maturity Model for RDM providers with Node-level implementation guidance,” an online project, where she continued work on the ELIXIR Research Data Management Handbook and Maturity Model.
Diana participated in Project 27 “Towards a more scalable, sustainable and integrated research data management ecosystem”, updating the styleguide for RDMkit.
Erik participated in Project 5, “Bidirectional bridge: GitHub ⇄ Bio.tools,” in Germany, where he explored mapping EDAM topics from GitHub descriptions.
- Uku participated in Project 24, “Sustainable computing in Galaxy through reuse and energy-aware job scheduling” in Germany.

Celebrating Achievements

Marilin Moor won the special award for content of the Artur Lind scholarship at the Gene Forum with her 4-minute video on the topic of “Genetic science and me 10 years from now”.

Publications

The RDMkit serves as a gateway to a wealth of RDM knowledge, including best-practice guidelines, domain-specific solutions, curated tool assemblies, and training resources. It supports researchers at all stages of the research data lifecycle, helping to improve data quality, reproducibility, and accessibility. A recent publication in the Cell Press open-access journal Patterns tells the story of how the RDMkit was developed and how it has grown through community contributions.
This summer, Marilin Moor, Product Manager at ELIXIR Estonia and now a PhD student at the University of Tartu, published a new article presenting FiBar, a tool for analysing fiber diameters in complex drug delivery systems. The research was carried out in collaboration with the Institute of Pharmacy (Laura Männaste, Marta Putrinš, and Professor Karin Kogermann) and Dmytro Fishman, Associate Professor in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Tartu Institute of Computer Science.
We are proud to share a recent publication by our team member, Marilin Moor, who contributed to a study on advanced wound care. Published in Materials Today Bio, the article titled “Living probiotics-loaded wound matrices prepared by microchip electrospinning” introduces a novel method for treating skin infections. This work was a collaborative effort involving researchers from the University of Tartu’s Institute of Pharmacy, Institute of Technology, and the Institute of Computer Science, as well as the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research at the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Industry Collaboration

Ongoing collaboration with Protobios regarding genome analysis and modelling.

This text was edited with the help of AI (ChatGPT 5.0, developed by OpenAI).