The 2024 Hackathon: Enhancing BGE’s Barcode Sequencing Stream

Data generation, processing, integration, the curation of BOLD… The 2024 BGE Barcoding Hackathon, hosted from 23-25 April in Leiden, the Netherlands, and coordinated by Naturalis Biodiversity Center, aimed to improve the digital infrastructure and practices supporting the single barcoding workflow stream of the BGE project. But what is a hackathon, actually? And why is it so important?

 

Rutger Vos, BGE’s Barcoding Data and Data Infrastructure pillar leader from Naturalis Biodiversity Center, explains: “There are many different types of hackathons, but what we do is bring together researchers, developers and bioinformaticians who are normally spread out across the BGE project in different tasks and work packages. We bring them all together in the same room, because on some really detailed technical issues it is just much more productive to be able to look at each other’s screens, to bounce ideas off each other and to develop ideas together.”

Specific topics of attention included the gap list for species sampling, improving computational provenance in barcoding pipelines, standardizing barcode QA checks, extending the BOLD database, reference library curation, and wider integration of barcoding infrastructures. 

A big thank you to all participants!

 

Ready to watch the short hackathon video? Click below and enjoy!

Photo & Video: BGE