iBOL Europe, the European node of iBOL, aims to coordinate and facilitate interactions and knowledge exchange across Europe to support iBOL's global efforts. iBOL Europe acts as a nexus for the DNA barcoding community in Europe, to produce, curate, and provide access to a complete DNA barcode reference library for European species. Support from the Horizon Europe Biodiversity Genomics Europe project (BGE) has enabled an expansion of activities and profile. Within the BGE context, iBOL Europe has been promoting technology development, capacity building, and production and publishing of data – all to improve DNA barcoding in Europe.
This GitHub organisation is geared towards the first activity: technology development.Developing bioinformatics pipelines is one of the main areas requiring technology development. This includes developing and publishing pipelines for target list generation, genome skimming, QA/QC of the resulting barcodes, processing of metabarcoding data, and reference library curation. Although the development of each of these components takes place in disparate repositories, there is a shared need to adopt best practices and structure the outcomes such that they can be reported to the funders (i.e., complying with OSS requirements), are in line with the activities of our consortium partners (i.e., are WorkFlowHub compliant), and obtain FAIR digital object representations. This GitHub organisation is intended to help address that need by bringing codebases together for mutual inspiration.