In May 2025, FUNGI-NL was presented at the BioSB Faculty Meeting as part of the TDCC-LSH matchmaking session. This pitch marked an important first step in introducing the FUNGI-NL vision to the Dutch computational biology and life sciences community and in inviting broad community involvement in shaping the initiative.
During the session, we presented the core idea behind FUNGI-NL: a national, FAIR-compliant digital ecosystem for fungal research, designed to connect data, tools, training, and people across disciplines such as health, ecology, agriculture, and biotechnology.
The discussion highlighted the urgent need to better integrate fungal genomic data and metadata, improve reuse of bioinformatics tools and workflows, and strengthen digital competencies within the fungal research community.
A key outcome of the pitch was an open call to the community to actively contribute to FUNGI-NL.
We invite researchers, data stewards, and developers to engage with us by:
- Identifying key fungal research datasets, tools, and workflows currently used or developed in your teams
- Contributing curated fungal genomic and metadata datasets from your labs or collaborative projects
- Sharing bioinformatics tools, pipelines, or scripts developed for fungal genomics and metagenomics
- Highlighting skill gaps within your research groups and suggesting topics or formats for training modules
- Providing feedback on platform design and functionality
- Helping connect FUNGI-NL with national and international research initiatives, infrastructure providers, and industry partners
The positive response and constructive feedback at the BioSB Faculty Meeting confirmed strong community interest in a coordinated, national approach to FAIR fungal research. These contributions will directly shape the priorities, design, and impact of the FUNGI-NL platform.
We look forward to continuing this dialogue and building FUNGI-NL together as a truly community-driven hub for data-driven fungal research in the Netherlands.