Genopole held its first D4GEN Hackathon on 19–21 May 2022 with the goal of creating interdisciplinary, computational genomics communities aimed particularly at the sharing, preservation and (re)use of genomics Big Data.

During the event, held at the Telecom Paris Sud campus, a number of teams advanced projects to imagine and develop innovative problem-solving solutions in four topics:

• FAIRification (facilitated research management) of omics (meta)data
• Blockchain technologies
• Artificial intelligence technologies (machine, deep and transfer learning, etc.)
• Development of informatics tools for data analyses

One of the teams at the event was that composed of first-year PhD student at LaBGem (UMR8030/Genoscope) Jérôme Arnoux, postdoc researcher at MetaGenoPolis (Inrae) and former PhD student at LaBGem Guillaume Gautreau, and Telecom Sud Paris students Lucas Gruda and Sullian Le Bozec, all accompanied by ENSIIE expert Stefania Dumbrava. The objective of their project, called PANORAMA, was to propose a new model for the management and analysis of pangenomics data in the era of Big Data.

Looking back at the D4GEN Hackathon, Jérôme Arnoux comments, "after 48 hours of non-stop work, we proposed a solution oriented towards graphics databases, which responded well to the stated challenge. The solution will be deployed as a part of my thesis aimed at deepening the study of the dynamics of microbial genomes and metabolisms."

Of the nine projects in the competition, PANORAMA took home the third-place prize, comprising a €600 gift certificate to be shared amongst the team members. Congratulations to the team!