(13-09-25) 19th International Symposium on Integrative Bioinformatics

I attended the Gatersleben Research Conference / 19th International Symposium on Integrative Bioinformatics (GRC-IB 2025) at IPK Gatersleben, which brought together plant scientists, bioinformaticians, and data infrastructure experts to discuss how to integrate heterogeneous omics data, make them FAIR, and apply AI/ML in crop research. I presented MEANTools for the systematic and unsupervised biosynthetic pathway discovery. The meeting emphasized practical data management, reference datasets, and workflows that enable truly integrative plant genomics and phenomics, but also showcased forward-looking talks on network inference, knowledge-graph construction, and visualization tools for large plant datasets. For me, the useful part was seeing how European plant institutes are standardizing pipelines and metadata so that multi-omics resources from different crops can actually be re-used, and how these standards can feed directly into LLM- or KG-based discovery tools like the ones we are building at the Brightlands Future Farming Institute at Venlo. The format was very collaborative, with plenty of time for discussions on future joint projects and data sharing.