The Bioinformatics Virtual Coordination Network presents:

Holistic Bioinformatic Approaches used in Microbiome Research

A step-by-step open access conference showcasing state-of-the-art bioinformatics pipelines for microbiome research

The Bioinformatics Virtual Coordination Network (BVCN) is committed to reducing entry barriers into bioinformatics for researchers. For the first time in June 2021, this online conference will bring together early career researchers (ECRs) from across the globe who are equally committed to reducing such entry barriers, and who would like to exchange and share their research and bioinformatics experiences in a step-by-step format with a global and interdisciplinary audience.

Background The BVCN was established to facilitate entry of researchers in environmental and biomedical sciences into computational biology. To further this goal, this upcoming conference is designed to provide a platform for showcasing bioinformatic projects from inception to publication. The holistic analysis of data intensive projects may contain many steps that are not covered in the tutorials or documented in the methods section of publications - our speakers will try and capture these elements in their presentations.

We will send the final conference schedule on 1 June 2021. If you have any questions about information in this email or other questions about the BVCN conference, please reach out to conference chair Dr. Ben Tully (tully.bj@gmail.com).

Before we continue, we would like to emphasize that the BVCN conference is intended to be inclusive and accessible for all attendees. As such, we will not allow any violations of the BVCN Code of Conduct.

Conference dates - 7-11 June 2021

Pre-conference survey - submit by 7 May 2021 11:59PM US PST (<5 minutes in length)

Conference schedule

A finalized schedule will be available before the start of the conference (1 June 2021). To help you plan your conference, here are some tentative times for various events. Start times are planned to allow attendees from both hemispheres to attend most events.

Day 1 Featured presentations (West) - 7 June 14:00 UTC

Day 1 Featured presentations (East) - 8 June 00:00 UTC

Day 2 Featured presentations (West) - 8 June 14:00 UTC

Day 2 Featured presentations (East) - 9 June 00:00 UTC

Day 3 Featured presentations (West) - 9 June 14:00 UTC

Day 3 Featured presentations (East) - 10 June 00:00 UTC

Day 3 Fireside chat (East) - 10 June 02:00 UTC

Day 4 Q&A (West/East) - 10 June TBD

Day 4 Fireside chat (West) - 10 June TBD (following Q&A)

Day 5 Virtual Poster Hall (open) - 11 June 14:00 UTC

Day 5 Virtual Poster Hall (close) - 12 June 02:00 UTC

Featured speaker presentations

Each day, two presentations will premiere as part of a Zoom webinar

After the Western Hemisphere premiere, the presentations will be available for access through our YouTube channel

Technology: Zoom Webinar, YouTube, Rocket.chat

Day 1: Biomedical Microbiology

Miriam Bravo López, Ph.D candidate, International Laboratory for Human Genome Research (LIIGH)-UNAM
- Paleogenomic landscape of pathogens in Pre- and Contact individuals from the Americas
Himel Mallick, Senior Scientist, Merck Research Laboratories
- Tweedieverse - A Single Home for Microbiome Multi-omics Differential Analysis

Day 2: Environmental Microbiology

Harriet Alexander, Assistant Scientist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
- EukHeist: Scalable and automated discovery of eukaryotic genomes from a global dataset
Chiara Vanni, Ph.D. candidate, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology
- Unifying the microbial known and unknown coding sequence space

Day 3: Microbial Biotechnology

Bérénice Batut, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Freiburg
- Galaxy for microbiome via ASaiM story - From a local project to a global effort to support microbiome data analysis
Martin Steinegger, Assistant Professor, Seoul National University
- Metagenomic pathogen detection using MMseqs2, Plass, and Linclust

LIVE Q&A Session

Start time: TBD

Technology: Zoom Webinar, Google Docs, Rocket.chat

Fireside chats

The fireside chats are events where attendees can gather in a virtual space to converse with other conference attendees. Registration will be required, but will be open to all. Suggested chat topics will be provided to help get the conversation rolling.

10 June 2021 - Eastern Hemisphere

Start time: After completion of Featured Speaker webinar - 02:00 UTC

10 June 2021 - Western Hemisphere

Start time: TBD (proceeding or following Q&A Session as time allows)

Technology: Zoom breakout rooms

Posters

Virtual posters must be submitted by 1 June 2021 - submission “portal” opens 25 May 2021

Anyone can submit a poster until the final submission deadline 1 June 2021. (We highly encourage anyone considering making a poster to do so – the impact of the conference will be directly correlated to the number of conversations we can start between researchers sharing ideas!)
Virtual posters can and should be different from the typical poster hall
- Acceptable styles of posters include:
  - Static PDF
  - Short (3-slide) PowerPoint presentation
  - Recorded video/audio (3-min) of you presenting a PowerPoint presentation or static PDF (MP4 format)
Posters will be available for the duration of the conference
- Every submitted poster will have a dedicated channel in the Rocket.chat platform to allow for asynchronous discussion between the poster author(s) and other attendees throughout the week!
Posters will be hosted privately for conference attendees only
- Static posters will be hosted through a private Figshare link
- Video/audio recordings will be hosted on the BVCN YouTube as an unlisted/private video
- All posters will be removed from these repositories at the close of the conference
Posters submission will open 25 May 2021. Links for submitting a poster will be sent to all attendees
There will be a virtual poster hall using Gather.town with Eastern and Western hemisphere start times above. Scheduled virtual poster sessions will last 2 hours, but the virtual poster hall will remain open from 14:00 UTC 10 June - 02:00 UTC 11 June, so that attendees can plan to meet at their posters when their schedule allows.
We would like to make it that all posters are accessible to all other participants. To make this a reality, poster files should be compatible with screen readers and text-to-speech software.
- PowerPoint has several features for making presentations accessible. Screen reading information is available here and providing alternative text for figures can be found here.
- For posters in PDF format, you can check its optical character recognition (OCR) by running it through https://ocr.space/ or a similar OCR application. And we recommend the use of alternative text to describe figures.

Posters include:

title
abstract
virtual poster optimized with accessibility elements (formats: 3-slide PowerPoint, PDF)
(optional) voice recording of the poster (less than 3-minutes; format: MP4)
(optional) one question that you want/need/desire to be answered. Think bioinformatic centric conversation starters, like: “How do I convert my data table to look like this type of figure?” or “Which tool performs this specific step I need in my analysis?”

Poster awards: Graduate students and ECRs will be eligible for 1 of 3 poster prizes awarded to commemorate work that exemplifies open science approaches to bioinformatics.

Conference software

Zoom - the Zoom app can be downloaded for free. All attendess will be sent links for events
Rocket.chat - all attendees will receive a month subscription of Rocket.chat
Gather.town - attendees will receive an invite to attend the virtual poster session

Accessibility

Primary conference language: English (our conference platforms allow for attendees to self-aggregate into channels for language options driven by the attendee community)

Recorded presentations will premiere with edited and cleaned closed captioning. Presentations will also be provided in Powerpoint format with alternative text provided for figures.

The Q&A Session will have Zoom provided live captioning and all questions and speaker answers will be recorded (and formalized) in a shared document format, providing a lasting resource for reference.

Attendees will be guided with instructions to make accessible versions of their posters. Poster formats that allow for screen reading software and alternative text will be required, along with (optional) attendee voice-overs introducing/describing their posters.

BVCN