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ISMB 2026

34th Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) Conference — Washington Hilton, Washington, DC, USA · July 12–16, 2026. Hybrid (in-person + ISCB Nucleus virtual platform).

Status: Scaffold — meeting upcoming (~9 weeks out as of May 11, 2026); structure landed now so bulk per-tool extraction can run immediately after the meeting closes Jul 16, 2026. Program shape is fixed (day-by-day COSI grid published), keynote slate is announced, accepted-paper list is not yet public.

One factual correction up front: the original task brief listed this as the joint ISMB/ECCB year in Liverpool. That was last year — ISMB/ECCB 2025 ran Jul 20–24, 2025 in Liverpool. ISMB 2026 is ISMB-only in Washington, DC. ECCB 2026 is a separate event (Geneva, Aug 31–Sep 4, 2026, "Biodiversity, AI & Health" theme); we treat ECCB 2026 as a possible future sister vault, not folded into this one.

Why this is in the vault

  • Methods-and-tools depth. ISMB is the largest computational-biology meeting (~2000–3000 attendees) and the one venue where methods underlying tools like CHIEF, GigaPath, Geneformer, scGPT, Cell2location, SpatialData, SCimilarity, and PerturbNet get peer-reviewed and presented. Many tools we've already documented from EuroBioC2025 / GBCC2025 (msqrob2, edgeR, SpatialData, Voyager, plyxp, Tidyomics, OSTA, signifinder, sosta, footprintR, …) re-surface here with updates, methods papers, or new downstream uses.
  • Formal peer-reviewed proceedings. Unlike EuroBioC / GBCC (community workshops with informal talk selection), ISMB has a real two-round peer-reviewed proceedings track that publishes in Bioinformatics (Oxford University Press) ~1 month before the meeting. Tool entries from ISMB can cite a published DOI — a depth the community-conference vaults don't get.
  • AACR axis fit. Six ISMB COSIs map directly onto the AACR vault's axes: MLCSB (foundation models / scGPT-class), TransMed (translational), BioVis (figure / dashboard tooling), HiTSeq (sequencing methods used in cancer cohorts), VarI (somatic variant interpretation), NetBio (pathway / network methods). MICROBIOME, RegSys, Function, 3DSIG, CompMS, BOSC, and EvolCompGen feed adjacent axes (cancer-microbiome, regulatory genomics, structural drug-target work, proteomics, open-source infrastructure).
  • Cross-vault people overlap. The Robinson lab (Zurich), Love lab (UNC), Carey (Channing/Harvard), Soneson (FMI), Mangiola (Adelaide), Castelo (UPF), Borman (Turku), Marconato (EMBL), and the broader scverse / SpatialData crowd typically split between EuroBioC, GBCC, and ISMB each year. We expect substantial speaker overlap to drive cross-vault links.

What we have / will have to work with

Source Coverage Notes
Abridged agenda (PDF) full 5-day grid by room and COSI programme.AbridgedAgenda.ISMB.2026.pdf — already extracted in program-notes.md
Distinguished Keynotes page 5 plenary speakers, talk titles for 2 iscb.org/ismb2026/whats-happening/distinguished-keynotes
Track Details page all COSI + special + open tracks iscb.org/ismb2026/whats-happening/track-details
Proceedings (Bioinformatics journal) peer-reviewed full papers online-only OUP special issue, posted ~1 month pre-conference; CC-BY; ~$700 author APC. Submission window Nov 11, 2025 – Jan 20, 2026 (closed); notifications May 5, 2026; APC due May 7, 2026. Accepted-paper list not yet public as of May 11.
Per-COSI sites per-track speaker rosters each COSI runs its own page (e.g., microbiome-cosi.org/ismb-2026, evolcompgen.org/ismb_2026) — populated as accept notifications go out from May 5
BOSC 2026 site Bioconductor / open-source track inside ISMB open-bio.org/events/bosc-2026/ — 2 keynotes (Eric Green, Maryam Zaringhalam) + 2 panels
ISCB Nucleus platform virtual + on-demand recordings post-meeting; logged-in registrants get on-demand video for ~6 months
Preprints bioRxiv preprints flagged "to appear in ISMB 2026" typical pattern — most ISMB Proceedings papers have a bioRxiv mirror filed Jan–Mar 2026
Slide deposits uneven; some on Zenodo, some on speaker labs no central Zenodo community for ISMB; expect ad-hoc per-speaker
Press / social extensive; #ISMB2026 on Bluesky, Mastodon, X useful for tracking real-time talk reactions; not a primary source

Program shape

ISMB 2026 runs Sunday Jul 12 (tutorials + opening keynote) through Thursday Jul 16 (closing keynote). Mon–Thu morning starts with a Distinguished Keynote followed by 11 parallel COSI / special-track sessions in three slots (11:00–13:00, 14:20–16:00, 16:40–18:00). The Sunday day-zero is tutorials + Student Council Symposium + DREAM Challenge.

Counts:

  • 5 Distinguished Keynotes (one per day, ~1 hour each)
  • 22 COSI tracks + 7 special / closed tracks + 1 Open Session ("Bioinformatics in the USA") + 1 equity track + 1 publishing session + Industry Workshop + Pathogen Data Network forum + NIH/ODSS
  • 9 tutorials (IP1–IP9), all Sunday Jul 12, full-day
  • >600 expected scientific talks (per ISCB's own framing)
  • Two posters-and-exhibitors blocks per day (morning + afternoon coffee), Mon–Thu
  • BOSC 2026 nested inside — Jul 14–15, runs as a 2-day COSI within ISMB
  • CollaborationFest (CoFest) Jul 17–18, separate registration, hackathon-style follow-on (sister event to GBCC2025's CoFest)

Organization

conferences/ismb-2026/
├── index.md             # this page
├── program-notes.md     # internal working file — day-by-day grid + COSI shortlist
├── themes.md            # cross-day synthesis (deferred until post-meeting)
├── digest/              # day-by-day recap (deferred until post-meeting)
│   ├── day-0-sunday.md      # tutorials + SCS + DREAM + Durbin keynote
│   ├── day-1-monday.md      # Troyanskaya + HitSeq/iRNA/RegSys/Microbiome/CompMS/...
│   ├── day-2-tuesday.md     # Majumder + HitSeq/iRNA/RegSys/NetBio/SysMod/BioVis/BOSC/...
│   ├── day-3-wednesday.md   # Zitnik + MLCSB/TransMed/3D/NetBio/EvolCompGen/VarI/BOSC/CAMDA/...
│   └── day-4-thursday.md    # MLCSB/3D/EvolCompGen/CAMDA + Bustamante closing
├── keynotes/            # one entry per distinguished keynote (deferred)
├── topics/              # cross-cutting bins (deferred)
│   ├── foundation-models/   # MLCSB-heavy (Zitnik, Troyanskaya keynotes feed this)
│   ├── spatial-imaging/     # MLCSB + RegSys + BioVis overlap
│   ├── single-cell/         # MLCSB + RegSys + Function overlap
│   ├── variant-interpretation/   # VarI + TransMed
│   ├── microbiome/          # Microbiome COSI
│   ├── proteomics-massspec/ # CompMS + Function
│   ├── open-source-infra/   # BOSC + BOKR
│   └── translational/       # TransMed + Industry Workshop + NIH/ODSS
├── tools/               # PRIMARY artifact — one entry per package / method
│   └── index.md
└── sessions/            # full abstract index (post-meeting, after accept notifications)
    └── index.md

The tools/ directory is the load-bearing artifact, same shape as EuroBioC2025 and GBCC2025. ISMB-specific additions to the per-tool template (see tools/index.md): a Proceedings row pointing to the published Bioinformatics DOI when applicable, and a COSI track field to make the cross-COSI traffic visible (e.g., a single-cell method may land in MLCSB but be benchmarked against RegSys).

What's different from EuroBioC / GBCC

  • Scale. EuroBioC ~250 attendees, GBCC ~300. ISMB ~2000–3000 attendees, >600 talks, 22 parallel tracks. Per-tool extraction will be substantially larger — the constraint is reviewer bandwidth, not source availability.
  • Peer-reviewed proceedings. Every accepted proceedings paper has a DOI before the meeting, so tool pages here will be unusually "complete" — DOI + GitHub + benchmarks + figures — even before talks happen.
  • Domain breadth. EuroBioC = Bioconductor (R). GBCC = Galaxy + Bioconductor. ISMB spans Python, R, C++, Julia, web, cloud, and quantum (yes — Q4LS / Quantum for Life Sciences runs as a Tuesday track). Tool entries cannot assume any one ecosystem.
  • Awards and recognition arc. ISMB hands out four ISCB awards in 2026 (Senior Scientist → Durbin; Innovator → Troyanskaya; Overton → Zitnik; plus career awards for fellows). Keynote treatments need an "award arc" note that the EuroBioC / GBCC keynotes don't have.
  • BOSC + Bioconductor-2026 spillover. BioC2026 is Aug 10–12, 2026 in Seattle — a month after ISMB. Many Bioconductor speakers present at BOSC during ISMB and then again at BioC2026. Tool entries built from BOSC at ISMB will need to anticipate a BioC2026 re-up.

Sources

Next step

  • Now (pre-meeting): monitor for the public accepted-papers list. Notifications to authors go out May 5, 2026; the Bioinformatics supplement typically posts ~mid-June. Once the list is public we can scaffold likely tool pages from titles + bioRxiv pairs without waiting for the meeting.
  • During the meeting (Jul 12–16): real-time capture of slide DOIs / Zenodo deposits via #ISMB2026 social.
  • Bulk tool-page extraction (immediately post-meeting, Jul 17+): roughly 60–120 candidate entries spanning the proceedings papers + COSI-invited talks. Existing-in-corpus tools (Tidyomics, edgeR, SpatialData, signifinder, OSTA, msqrob2, sosta, footprintR, plyxp, mia, Voyager) get an "ISMB 2026 update" section appended; new ISMB-debuting tools get fresh entries.
  • CoFest follow-up (Jul 17–18): capture any Bioconductor↔Galaxy↔ISMB tool wrapping artifacts that emerge (parallel to GBCC2025 CoFest's GSVA wrapper deliverable).