A delegation from the EMBL Australia Partner Laboratory Network joined researchers from around the globe at the 5th EMBL Partnership Conference in Heidelberg to explore the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in life sciences.
This year’s theme, ‘AI in One Health’, focused on how AI can drive innovation across biomedical research – from molecular medicine and precision health to genomics and imaging.
Over three days (31 March – 2 April 2025), attendees heard from leading researchers, shared new ideas and made new connection across the EMBL partnership network.
Dr Qi Zhang, an EMBL Australia group leader at the South Australian immunoGENomics Cancer Institute (SAiGENCI), was part of the organising committee and helped shape the program alongside scientists from EMBL, MIMS (Sweden), the Michael Sars Centre (Norway) and Vilnius University (Lithuania).
Prof Eduardo Eyras (EMBL Australia Group Leader at the John Curtin School of Medical Research, ANU) and Daisy Kavanagh (PhD student in the Weatheritt Group at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research) also presented their research during the conference.
Prof Eyras, who develops methods using AI and machine learning and is keen to help others apply them in their work, spoke about decoding the epitranscriptome at single-molecule resolution.
He said the partnership conference helped him form (and enable for others) new international connections and opportunities for collaborations and learn about research initiatives in other countries.
“You meet people working on completely different problems in different fields, and yet we’re running into the same challenges – either technological or theory problems – to solve with different data sets,” Prof Eyras said.
“For instance, AI models to study genomics and health records run into similar issues regarding underrepresented populations, heterogeneity of the data quality and completeness, and AI-model hallucinations.
“The conference has given me a wider perspective about the applications of AI and, for my research, it has been very helpful to see what types of research questions other groups are trying to solve with AI.”
Daisy Kavanagh presented her work using single-cell network analysis to uncover X-chromosome inactivation escape signatures, which are linked to autoimmune disease, cancer biology and sex-biased disease susceptibility.
The EMBL Partnership Conference is held every three years and aims to strengthen collaborations across the EMBL partnership network by focusing on a shared scientific theme.
This year’s program featured keynote talks, research presentations, and a dedicated Young Investigators Meeting for PhD students and postdocs.