MALDIBANK: A Comprehensive Solution to Microbial Challenges In an era marked by pressing environmental and health challenges, including climate change, biodiversity loss, global epidemics, and food security, understanding and leveraging the power of microbes is critical. Microbes, fundamental to the biosphere, impact everything from ecosystem dynamics to human health. However, their vast diversity remains largely underestimated. To harness this potential, precise identification of microorganisms is crucial, especially given their varied implications across different sectors. Over the past 15 years, MALDI-TOF (Matrix-Assisted Laser Desorption/Ionization Time-of-Flight) mass spectrometry (MS) has revolutionized microbial identification in fields such as clinical microbiology, food safety, environmental monitoring, and sustainable agriculture. Despite its transformative potential, MALDI-TOF MS technology has been underutilized outside clinical microbiology. MALDIBANK emerges as a groundbreaking initiative to extend the reach of this technology, providing innovative solutions for understanding and utilizing microbial diversity for global problem-solving. MALDIBANK is conceptualized as a global, cloud-based, open MALDI spectra databank for the identification of microorganisms, combining a vast spectrum database with advanced algorithmic tools. This databank will facilitate processing, characterization, epidemiological surveillance, and more, embodying Open Science and FAIR data principles. It aims to become a new reference in microbial identification, drawing parallels with the impact of GenBank in genomics. By integrating 100,000 reference spectra with rich metadata and employing deep learning models, MALDIBANK will enhance microbial characterization and support areas like antimicrobial resistance prediction and environmental monitoring. It will serve as a dynamic resource for the global scientific community, enabling the exploration of microbial capabilities an

canSERVs mission is to make cutting-edge and customised research services available to the cancer research community EU wide, enable innovative R&D projects and foster precision medicine for patients benefit across Europe. By connecting, coordinating, and aligning existing oncology and complimentary research infrastructures (RIs) and providing services in a synergistic way transnationally, canSERV will capitalise on the critical mass of experts and cutting-edge services offered by canSERVs RIs and their extended network. canSERV brings together world-class European life science RIs (BBMRI, EURO-BIOIMAGING, ELIXIR, EU-IBISBA, EuroPDX, EU-OPENSCREEN, INSTRUCT, EATRIS, INFRAFRONTIER, EMBRC, ECRIN, EATRIS, MIRRI, ARIE, CCE, EORTC and IARC) that collectively not only covers all aspects along the development pipeline for oncology, but is also capable of interconnecting these technologies providing users a guidance for navigating them through the entire translational value chain. A patient organisation or resp. governance board members wil bring the patients perspective, while the two SMEs, ARTTIC and ttopstart, will provide valuable input regarding stakeholder engagement, and project management activities. A common access management system (CAMS) will be developed based on mature solutions from INSTRUCT and BBMRI. The CAMS will provide a method for selection of services, construction and submission of research proposals, multi-step review of research proposals, and tracking of the access process from approval through delivery to conclusion. Through a united user-intuitive transnational access where a united catalogue of oncology services will be offered, our users will have access to a comprehensive service portfolio. As our ambition is to scale up canSERV to a pan-European collaboration of RIs for accelerating the development and implementation of solutions for the cancer patient community, the sustainability of this network beyond the end of the project will also be addressed.

H2020 EU-LAC ResInfra project served to boost the bi-regional collaboration on research infrastructures (RIs) between European Union (EU) and Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) countries. To this aim a variety of different activities were developed that have proven the importance of RIs as a key pillar in boosting the R&D activities between regions and the need to maintain a sustainable collaboration at governmental level. Despite the success of the results of EU-LAC ResInfra Project, there is still work to do in order to have a solid and sustainable framework of cooperation to enhance the bi-regional collaboration on research infrastructures. Latin America and the Caribbean has a unique landscape of natural laboratories that can provide comparative advantages to host the development of RI’s, as well as high impact science on specific thematic areas that are a priority in both regions. It has been deemed necessary to increase the visibility of both EU and LAC RI models and characteristics to advance in a greater collaboration for a common roadmapping exercise, agreements in long term funding, transnational access, capacity building and mutual openness for the development of a RIs common area. EU-LAC ResInfra Plus has brought together a wide and comprehensive consortium of 20 crucial partners from the EU and LAC countries. The project includes a balanced mix of governmental representatives responsible of the development of RIs policies at national level, RTD funding agencies from EU countries (Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Romania, and Spain) and LAC countries (Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Chile, Peru and Uruguay,) as well as a consolidated group of European RIs: Instruct-ERIC, LifeWatch-ERIC, RICAP and MIRRI-ERIC. This broad spectrum of partners gathers to all the RIs stakeholders to ensure that the project activities and outputs serve to strengthening the bi-regional collaboration.

Instruct-ERIC prides itself on being a champion of gender equality within the research infrastructure community. Following the lifecycle of the first gender equality plan, Instruct has enhanced an already strong historical track record of gender equality, raising the base level of understanding and engagement with diversity practices and actions, whilst also reaching new heights of equality in the wider structural biology community. Instruct has expanded its ambition to include diversity in its equality activities, hence its second iteration being a diversity and gender equality plan – it was crucial to use the momentum gained from the initial audit of Hub staff and activities to measure feedback to develop impactful actions that Instruct can commit to. The culture of gender equality in Instruct runs from the decision-making level, through the Hub and its committees, to the way in which calls and access are provided to users, resulting in an increasingly diverse community of researchers that access Instruct services, providing the launchpad for continuing and improved equality in the structural biology community for years to come. Support from the Newcomer Gender Equality Champions prize will help Instruct to be even more ambitious with its future targets for gender equality and diversity.

EU-LAC ResInfra will identify a number of Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) Research Infrastructures (RIs) that may be considered eligible for the construction of a bi-regional collaboration. This will be carried out through the definition of minimal key requirements these RIs would need to develop in the coming years. To this aim, the Project will build on the prioritisation results of the EU-CELAC Senior Official Meeting on Science and Technology (SOM) Working Group (WG) on Research Infrastructures (RI) and, more specifically, will take as a reference the mapping exercises developed in previous EU funded projects. In addition, EU-LAC ResInfra will develop a map of National and Regional Research Infrastructure policies, and their corresponding strategies and plans, including funding mechanisms that might be used to support the construction and operation of future EU-LAC RIs. Furthermore, EU-LAC ResInfra will use all the results and information obtained for drafting a Sustainability Plan, which will be presented to the EU-CELAC WG RI for discussion and endorsement. The Plan will include specific actions to support the bi-regional collaboration in a mid-term perspective. The objectives are to design specific variable geometry instruments for co-funding RIs of common interest, and to design measures that pursue the strengthening of the bi-regional RI cooperation, seeking to maximise the impact of the RI collaboration in the construction of the EU-CELAC Common Research Area. Finally, the Project aims to show the feasibility of the EU-LAC RI collaboration through existing examples, thanks to the development of four Pilots in different scientific domains that are linked to some existing Research Infrastructures: INSTRUCT-ERIC, LIFEWATCH-ERIC, E-RIHS and RICAP.