Mission

Despite tremendous advances in sequencing technologies, a large percentage of eukaryotic genomes remain un- or poorly-annotated—due to high costs, long compute times, and a lack of robust methods—hindering progress in fields from agriculture to medicine. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence offers the potential to revolutionize genome annotation by enabling faster, more accurate predictions of gene structure, alternative splicing, and regulatory elements, yet there is still a critical need to bring together domain experts in bioinformatics, machine learning, and genomics to translate these AI methods into practical, scalable pipelines. To address this gap, we have invited leading scientists to Hiddensee from July 25–27, 2025, to share state-of-the-art deep-learning approaches and foster collaborations that will drive the field forward.

This workshop is made possible by the generous support of the Greifswald University Club, which awarded Katharina Hoff the Greifswald Research Award (Junior) in 2024 and, in line with the GUC’s mission to advance application-oriented research in functional genome science and AI in the life sciences, has provided funding to bring this interdisciplinary team together.

Scientific Program

The scientific program will encompass four sessions (exact time slots are preliminary, may be subject to change):

• Applied Genome Annotation (July 25th 2025, 18:30-20:00),
• From Genome to Embeddings (July 26th 2025, 9:00-10:30),
• From Embedding to Predictions (July 26th 2025, 10:45-13:00), and
• Flash Talks by Young Scientists (July 26th 2025, 17:00-18:00),

next to targeted sessions on discussing novel ideas to enhance genome annotation (July 26th 2025, 14:00-15:00) and to obtain funding to implement these ideas (July 27th 2025, 8:30-9:30).

Invited Speakers

• Felicitas Kindel, Forschungszentrum Jülich
• Frederikke Isa Marin, Unversity of Copenhagen
• Jens Keilwagen, Julius Kuehn-Institute
• Qussai Abbas, Technical University of Munich
• Sebastian Beier, Forschungszentrum Jülich
• Tomas Bruna, Joint Genome Institute, Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory
• Thomas Pierrot, InstaDeep
• Yannis Nevers, University of Strassbourg

Venue

The workshop will take place on the Biological Station on Hiddensee, Germany.

Please note that attendance is possible by invitation, only. Currently, the workshop is full.

Organizers

Katharina Hoff and Mario Stanke from the Bioinformatics Group at University of Greifswald are jointly organizing ths workshop. Contact: https://bioinf.uni-greifswald.de/bioinf/group/index.html.