The 25th European Conference on Computational Biology was held in Geneva from 31 August to 4 September 2026, organised by the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics at the CICG under the theme Biodiversity, AI & Health. The group was represented by Ulaş Işıldak, Tayyaba Alvi, Jing Lu, and Prasoon Pandey.
The main meeting ran from Monday 31 August to Wednesday 2 September, with talks in parallel sessions covering 50 proceedings papers and 31 highlight talks across five scientific areas: genomics, epigenomics, and genome editing; transcriptomics and gene regulation; proteins and structural biology; systems biology, multi-omics integration, and modelling; and biodiversity, sustainability, and environmental bioinformatics.
Here are the group members’ reflections:
Jing Lu enjoyed Stephen Quake’s keynote on the Tabula datasets, Aleksandra Walczak’s talk on immune receptor repertoires as an omics layer, and the MOSAIC stochastic modelling framework for its individual-agent representation with distinct behaviours and memory.
Tayyaba Alvi attended talks on microbiome enterotypes, sequence contamination removal, and causal inference, and volunteered and presented at the student symposium. A highlight was meeting researchers modelling multiple longitudinal exposures - a topic that was relevant to her own work in Mendelian randomisation for microbiome traits.
Ulaş Işıldak found several tools relevant to his microbiome research: theBIGbam for visualising metagenomic alignments, TPMM for detecting DNA inversions in low-depth data, and TaxVAMB for metagenomic binning - all potentially useful for datasets currently under analysis.
Prasoon Pandey, at his first ECCB, was struck by the conference’s breadth. He particularly enjoyed a talk applying universal differential equations to NF-κB and p53 cross-talk, and another on CREsted, a deep learning model for predicting chromatin accessibility. He also connected with researchers studying transcriptional noise in ageing and its link to disease.
The conference included poster sessions in the main meeting and student symposium:
- Jing presented “Directional Stochastic Drift Enables Predictive and Interpretable Omics Modeling” (session A, Monday 31 August, systems biology).
- Ulaş presented “Repurposing Blood Whole-Genome Sequencing to Study Leaky Gut” (session B, Tuesday 1 September).
- At the student symposium, Tayyaba presented “Mendelian Randomization for Microbiome Traits” and Prasoon presented “Quantifying the Regulatory Decline Dynamics Across the Aging Methylome”.
Beyond the science, the conference ran a bingo competition — which Jing won. Congratulations, Jing!