Quadram Institute Bioscience is hosting a 3-day food safety bioinformatics hackathon 2-4 June. The workshop aims at finding ways to translate bioinformatics tools into robust procedures and workflows for application in public health. The hackathon has been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and attendance is free with travel bursaries available. Attendance will be by selection to ensure a mix of skills and genders

The application of high-throughput sequencing to food-borne pathogens is transforming our understanding of how pathogens and resistance genes emerge, evolve and spread. It is also delivering translational impact in public health labs in the rapid identification and surveillance of food-borne pathogens and detection, analysis and control of food-borne outbreaks.

However, it is clear that there are challenges in translating tools developed by bioinformaticians into robust and reliable standard operating procedures and workflows needed for public health. Quadram Institute Bioscience aims to bridge these gaps by hosting this food safety bioinformatics hackathon, 2-4 June 2019 at the Quadram Institute, Norwich.

The hackathon will address global public health challenges of strategic relevance including:

• Antimicrobial resistance in the food chain
• Rapid foodborne pathogen outbreak investigation
• Visual mining of large scale public datasets of foodborne pathogens
• Extended sequence typing schemes

For more details, and to apply, please see https://quadram.ac.uk/hackathon0619/

• 30 March: Travel bursaries application close
• 5 April: Winners of Travel Bursaries informed. Other attendees confirmed.
• 1 June: Registration remains open on a first come, first served basis for any remaining places, attendees confirmed on an ongoing basis.