Bioconductor hackathon on spatial omics in Venice
- Davide Risso
- Events, Bioconductor
- 24 Jun, 2026
A Bioconductor-centric hackathon dedicated to spatial omics and image-derived data took place on San Servolo island, Venice, on 19-22 April 2026.
Organized by Davide Risso (University of Padova), Helena Crowell (CNAG Barcelona), and Wolfgang Huber (EMBL), the event brought together 27 researchers and software developers from Europe and the United States. Over three days, participants worked on shared challenges at the intersection of spatial omics, bioimage analysis, data infrastructure, and software interoperability.
The meeting was designed as a hands-on collaborative sprint. After an initial round of project planning, participants formed teams and focused on four main themes:
- Spatially stratified differential expression analysis
- Image and segmentation data manipulation and visualization
- Infrastructure and interoperability of spatial data in Bioconductor
- Facilitating the use of foundation models for the Bioconductor community
Each day combined focused development time with short progress updates, giving teams the opportunity to refine their goals, share technical hurdles, and identify common needs across projects. The hackathon concluded with a showcase of the work carried out during the meeting, including new code, vignettes, resources, and ideas for future development.
The outputs are available through a dedicated GitHub repository, and the main results have been summarized in a collaborative preprint.
Read the full report on the Bioconductor community blog.
