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ISMB 2026 — Program Notes (working file)

Internal-use working file. Source for the bulk tool-page generation pass that will run immediately after the meeting closes Jul 16, 2026. Not for end-reader consumption — formatting is utilitarian. Compiled from the public ISMB 2026 web pages and the abridged-agenda PDF, fetched 2026-05-11 (~9 weeks pre-meeting).

Tag legend: - [PROC] — proceedings paper (peer-reviewed in Bioinformatics); has a DOI ~1 month before meeting - [COSI] — COSI-invited talk; abstract-only submission, no DOI - [BOSC] — talk in the nested BOSC 2026 program (Jul 14–15) - [TUTORIAL] — Sunday Jul 12 tutorial (9 tracks, IP1–IP9) - [KEYNOTE] — distinguished keynote - [?] — placeholder; populated post-meeting

Sparse-coverage flags: - Accepted-paper list not yet public. Proceedings notifications go to authors May 5, 2026; the Bioinformatics online supplement typically posts mid-June 2026 (~1 month pre-meeting). Until then, per-paper titles + authors are not extractable from a public source. Monitor: https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics — ISMB 2026 special issue, expected Jun 2026. - Per-COSI speaker rosters trickle in. Microbiome and EvolCompGen COSI pages already list committees; most COSIs publish full speaker rosters in the 4–6 weeks before the meeting. Recheck the COSI sites listed below in early-to-mid June. - Sunday tutorials (IP1–IP9) have titles but no syllabi yet. Tutorial pages typically post 3–4 weeks pre-meeting. - Slide deposits. No central ISMB Zenodo community. Bioconductor speakers will deposit to zenodo.org/communities/bioconductor. Other slides ad-hoc; recheck individual lab sites post-meeting. - Recordings. ISCB Nucleus is the on-demand platform; recordings post incrementally over 2–4 weeks post-meeting and require login for full access.

Verified high-level facts (2026-05-11)

  • Conference: ISMB 2026 — 34th Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology
  • Dates: Sun Jul 12 – Thu Jul 16, 2026
  • Venue: Washington Hilton, Washington, DC, USA (hybrid; ISCB Nucleus virtual platform)
  • Theme: "A hub of science and global collaboration" — anniversary framing (>30 years of comp-bio)
  • Joint year? NO. This is ISMB-only. ISMB/ECCB joint year was 2025 (Liverpool). ECCB 2026 is a separate event: Geneva, Aug 31–Sep 4, 2026.
  • Scale: "Over 600 expected scientific talks" per ISCB framing; ~2000–3000 attendees historical baseline.
  • Proceedings: Online-only OUP Bioinformatics special issue. CC-BY. $700 author APC. Submission window Nov 11, 2025 – Jan 20, 2026 (closed). Notifications May 5, 2026. APC due May 7, 2026. Expected online publication ~mid-June 2026.
  • Abstracts: Window Jan 12 – Apr 9, 2026 (closed). Notifications May 5, 2026.
  • Distinguished Keynotes: 5 (one per day)
  • COSI tracks: 22 named COSIs + 7 special/closed tracks + 1 Open Session + 1 equity track + 1 publishing session + Industry Workshop + NIH/ODSS + Pathogen Data Network Forum + Q4LS (Quantum for Life Sciences) + WEB (Workshop on Education for Bioinformatics)
  • Tutorials: 9 Sunday Jul 12 full-day tutorials (IP1–IP9)
  • Nested events: BOSC 2026 (Jul 14–15) + Student Council Symposium (Sun) + DREAM Challenges (Sun) + CollaborationFest (Jul 17–18, post-conference)

Distinguished Keynotes (5)

Day Speaker Affiliation Title Award
Sun Jul 12, 18:30–19:30 Richard Durbin University of Cambridge, UK "More applications of the Burrows-Wheeler transform in computational genomics" ISCB 2026 Accomplishments by a Senior Scientist Award
Mon Jul 13, 8:40–10:00 Olga Troyanskaya Princeton University, USA "Toward Predictive Models of Human Biology and Disease" ISCB 2026 Innovator Award
Tue Jul 14, 8:40–10:00 Partha P. Majumder John C. Martin Centre for Liver Research & Innovations, India (TBD) —
Wed Jul 15, 8:40–10:00 Marinka Zitnik Harvard Medical School, USA (TBD — therapeutic-design AI) ISCB 2026 Overton Prize
Thu Jul 16, 16:40–18:00 Carlos D. Bustamante Galatea Bio (Founder/CEO), USA (TBD) —

All in International Ballroom – Center. Tuesday morning also includes the ISCB Fellows introduction before the Majumder keynote.

Day-by-day skeleton (from the abridged-agenda PDF)

Sunday Jul 12, 2026 — Day 0: Tutorials + SCS + DREAM + Opening Keynote

  • 09:00–10:45 + 11:00–13:00 + 14:00–16:00 + 16:15–18:00: Concurrent full-day tutorials and pre-conference events:
  • DREAM Challenge (International Ballroom – Center) — all-day
  • SCS (Student Council Symposium) (Room 3,4,6 Combo) — all-day; runs through 17:15
  • Tutorial IP1: Agentic AI System for In Silico Team Science: From LLM Basics to Lab Assistant Agents (Georgetown)
  • Tutorial IP2: Large Language Models and Agentic AI for Biomedical Informatics (Jefferson West) — afternoon only
  • Tutorial IP3: From Trees to Networks (Jefferson West) — morning only
  • Tutorial IP4: Generating realistic synthetic biological data using phylogenetics (Jefferson East) — afternoon only
  • Tutorial IP5: Computational Network Analysis of Omics Data (Jefferson East) — morning only
  • Tutorial IP6: Network Biology Workflows with Cytoscape and NDEx: Visualization, Analysis, Sharing, Automation, and Apps (International Ballroom – East) — afternoon only
  • Tutorial IP7: Quantum Computing for Multi-omics analyses (Lincoln West) — all-day
  • Tutorial IP8: Metagenomic sequence analysis using k-mer based methods (Lincoln East) — all-day
  • Tutorial IP9: Learning models of molecular sequence recognition from NGS data using biophysical machine learning (Monroe) — all-day
  • 16:00–18:00: Career Fair (Columbia)
  • 18:30–19:30: Conference Welcome + Distinguished Keynote: Richard Durbin "More applications of the Burrows-Wheeler transform in computational genomics" (International Ballroom – Center)
  • 19:30–21:00: Welcome Networking Reception (Columbia)

Monday Jul 13, 2026 — Day 1

  • 8:40–10:00: Morning Welcome + Distinguished Keynote: Olga Troyanskaya "Toward Predictive Models of Human Biology and Disease" (Innovator Award)
  • 10:00–11:00: Caffeinate & Connect with Posters and Exhibitors (Columbia)
  • 11:00–13:00, 14:20–16:00, 16:40–18:00 — three parallel-track sessions across 11 rooms:
  • HitSeq (Int. Ballroom Center)
  • iRNA (Int. Ballroom West)
  • RegSys (Int. Ballroom East)
  • Microbiome (Room 3,4,6 Combo)
  • NIH/ODSS (Room 8) — special closed track
  • CompMS (Georgetown)
  • TextMining (Jefferson West)
  • CSi (Jefferson East) — Computational and Systems Immunology
  • BOKR (Lincoln West)
  • Function (Lincoln East)
  • Tech Talks (Monroe)
  • 18:00–19:30: President's Reception (invite only)

Tuesday Jul 14, 2026 — Day 2

  • 8:40–10:00: Morning Welcome + ISCB Fellows Introduction + Distinguished Keynote: Partha P. Majumder
  • 11:00–13:00: HitSeq · iRNA · RegSys · Microbiome · Publication Session · BioInfoCore · SysMod · BioVis · BOKR/BOSC · Function · Tech Talks
  • 14:20–16:00: HitSeq · iRNA · RegSys · NetBio · Industry Workshop · BioInfoCore · SysMod · BioVis · BOSC · BOKR/Function · Quantum4Life Sciences (Q4LS)
  • 16:40–18:00: HitSeq · iRNA · RegSys · NetBio · Career Symposium · BioInfoCore · SysMod · BioVis · BOSC · Function · BOKR
  • 18:00–19:30: Success Circles (facilitated small-group networking)

Wednesday Jul 15, 2026 — Day 3

  • 8:40–10:00: Distinguished Keynote: Marinka Zitnik (Overton Prize) — AI for therapeutic design
  • 11:00–13:00, 14:20–16:00, 16:40–18:00 — three parallel-track sessions:
  • MLCSB (Int. Ballroom Center) — largest single track on the AACR axis
  • TransMed (Int. Ballroom West)
  • 3D[SIG] (Int. Ballroom East)
  • NetBio (Room 3,4,6 Combo)
  • GenCompBio (Room 8)
  • WEB (Georgetown) — Workshop on Education for Bioinformatics
  • EvolCompGen (Jefferson West) — starts today, runs Wed+Thu
  • VarI (Jefferson East)
  • BOSC (Lincoln West)
  • CAMDA (Lincoln East)
  • ICBO (Monroe) — International Conference on Biomedical Ontology, co-located

Thursday Jul 16, 2026 — Day 4 (close)

  • 8:40–10:00, 11:00–13:00, 14:20–16:00 — parallel-track sessions:
  • MLCSB (Int. Ballroom Center)
  • 3D (Int. Ballroom East)
  • Bioinformatics in the USA (Room 3,4,6 Combo) — Open Session track
  • GenCompBio (Room 8)
  • Education (Georgetown)
  • EvolCompGen (Jefferson West)
  • Equity and Diversity in CompBio Research (Jefferson East) — morning only
  • Pathogen Data Network Event (Jefferson East) — late-morning slot
  • CAMDA (Lincoln East)
  • ICBO (Monroe)
  • 16:40–18:00: Distinguished Keynote: Carlos D. Bustamante + Closing Ceremonies (International Ballroom – Center)

COSI tracks by AACR-axis fit

Direct AACR axis (high-priority for bulk extraction):

COSI What's there Notes
MLCSB (Machine Learning in Computational and Systems Biology) foundation models, scGPT-class methods, generative chemistry/biology, AI for drug discovery Wed+Thu (most session-hours of any COSI). Presidents: Anshul Kundaje, Öznur Taştan (term started Apr 2024). Zitnik keynote on Wed slots directly above this track.
TransMed (Translational Medical Informatics) clinical & translational Wed only
HiTSeq (High-Throughput Sequencing) sequencing methods → cancer cohort applications Mon+Tue
VarI (Variant Interpretation) somatic / germline variant calling, interpretation Wed only
BioVis (Biological Data Visualization) figure / dashboard tooling Tue only
NetBio (Network Biology) pathway methods, perturbation network analysis Tue+Wed
CompMS (Computational Mass Spectrometry) proteomics, metabolomics → cancer biomarker pipelines Mon only
Function (Gene & Protein Function Annotation) GO-style annotation, ML-driven function prediction Mon+Tue

Adjacent AACR axis (medium-priority):

COSI What's there Notes
Microbiome metaomics, cancer-microbiome axis Mon+Tue
3DSIG structural bioinformatics Wed+Thu
RegSys (Regulatory and Systems Genomics) enhancer / chromatin / regulatory inference Mon+Tue
iRNA (Integrative RNA Biology) non-coding RNA, RNA structure Mon+Tue
CSi (Computational and Systems Immunology) tumor immunology adjacent Mon only
SysMod systems-modeling / dynamical Tue only
CAMDA (Critical Assessment of Massive Data Analysis) benchmark competition track Wed+Thu

Infrastructure / community (separate treatment):

COSI What's there Notes
BOSC Bioconductor, scverse, Galaxy, open-source tooling Tue+Wed. Keynotes: Eric Green, Maryam Zaringhalam. Highest cross-vault overlap with EuroBioC / GBCC / BioC2026.
BOKR (Bio-Ontologies and Knowledge Representation) ontologies, knowledge graphs Mon+Tue (paired with BOSC Tue 11:00 slot)
BioInfo-Core bioinformatics core facility ops Tue only
Education training, curricula Thu only
TextMining NLP for biomedicine Mon only
EvolCompGen phylogenetics, comparative genomics Wed+Thu. Co-chairs Lars Arvestad, Dannie Durand.

Special tracks (closed, no abstract submissions):

  • NIH/ODSS (Mon) — Cloud and emerging tech for biomedical research
  • Industry Workshop (Tue) — AI/ML in pharma/biotech
  • Publication Session (Tue) — ML reproducibility & reporting standards
  • Q4LS (Tue) — Quantum for Life Sciences
  • Career Symposium (Tue) — job/networking
  • Pathogen Data Network Forum (Thu)
  • Equity and Diversity in CompBio Research (Thu)

Open Session:

  • Bioinformatics in the USA (Thu) — research across US institutions; health, biomedicine, biodiversity, environmental + agricultural
  • GenCompBio (Wed+Thu) — General Computational Biology catch-all

Co-located:

  • ICBO (Wed+Thu) — International Conference on Biomedical Ontology

Cross-vault speaker overlap watch

Expected ISMB 2026 speakers based on (a) typical EuroBioC → GBCC → ISMB → BioC annual rotation, (b) lab activity in proceedings-paper-class methods, (c) past ISMB participation. Not confirmed — pending public accept-paper list and per-COSI rosters.

Person Lab / institution Where they appeared (in corpus) Likely ISMB 2026 venue Likely topic
Charlotte Soneson Friedrich Miescher Institute EuroBioC2025 (footprintR talk), GBCC2025 (keynote) BOSC + possibly RegSys footprintR / Bioconductor maintenance arc
Stefano Mangiola Adelaide University EuroBioC2025 (Tidyomics), GBCC2025 (Tidyomics lightning + Oral 4) BOSC + MLCSB Tidyomics / HCA-scale tidy analysis
Helena Crowell CNAG-CRG Barcelona EuroBioC2025 (keynote: CRC whole-transcriptome imaging) RegSys or MLCSB or BOSC spatial transcriptomics CRC follow-up
Luca Marconato EMBL Heidelberg EuroBioC2025 (SpatialData) BOSC or MLCSB SpatialData (scverse) update
Tuomas Borman University of Turku EuroBioC2025 (mia workshop), GBCC2025 (mia/miaverse oral + workshop) BOSC + Microbiome mia / miaverse
Vincent J. Carey Channing/Harvard GBCC2025 (Oral 1; chair Oral 2B) BOSC Bioconductor framework / genomic data representation
Robert Castelo Pompeu Fabra GBCC2025 (atena lightning) BOSC atena / TE analysis
Mark D. Robinson (and lab — Samuel Gunz, Peiying Cai, Martin Emons, Jiayi Wang) University of Zurich EuroBioC2025 (DESpace, spatialFDA, ATAC-seq bias), GBCC2025 (sosta) RegSys + BOSC + MLCSB sosta / DESpace / spatialFDA proceedings updates
Michael I. Love (and lab — Justin Landis, Beatriz Campillo) UNC Chapel Hill GBCC2025 (plyxp, DTU; chair Oral 4) BOSC + RegSys + possibly iRNA plyxp, fishpond, tximeta, DRIMSeq-class
Federico Marini IMBEI Mainz EuroBioC2025 (iSEE workshop) BOSC iSEE / DeeDeeExperiment
Najla Abassi IMBEI Mainz EuroBioC2025 (DeeDeeExperiment) BOSC DeeDeeExperiment update
Lambda Moses (Dumitrascu lab) GBCC2025 (LUAD spatial; chair Oral 3) RegSys or MLCSB Voyager / SpatialFeatureExperiment update
Kasper D. Hansen Johns Hopkins GBCC2025 (allele-specific methylation, ONT) RegSys or HiTSeq methylation / long-read
Marcel Ramos Pérez CUNY / Roswell Park GBCC2025 (Billato histopath; CoFest team) BOSC MultiAssayExperiment / curatedTCGAData
Marius van den Beek Galaxy core GBCC2025 (IWC, workflows, dataset collections) BOSC Galaxy + IWC, possibly tutorial
Jeremy Goecks / Junhao Qiu OHSU / Galaxy GBCC2025 (GAIA, AI-augmented Galaxy) BOSC + possibly Industry/MLCSB GAIA / GalaxyMCP follow-up
Maria Doyle Bioconductor / WEHI GBCC2025 (Africa training; CoFest) BOSC + Education training / community

Keynote-level overlap to flag: Olga Troyanskaya (Princeton) and Marinka Zitnik (Harvard) are very likely to be cited in AACR 2026 ML-methods talks; their ISMB keynotes set up an ISMB→AACR cross-link opportunity. Carlos Bustamante's Galatea Bio framing connects to JPM 2026's population-genomics commercial wave.

Tool/package shortlist for the bulk extraction pass

Existing-in-corpus tools with high probability of an ISMB 2026 update slot (proceedings paper or BOSC talk):

  1. SpatialData (scverse, Marconato et al.) — proceedings paper likely; BOSC presentation likely. Last full release described EuroBioC2025; ISMB 2026 the natural venue for the v1.x → v2 / multimodal-imaging update.
  2. Tidyomics / tidySingleCellExperiment family (Mangiola) — GBCC keynote-adjacent; a Bioinformatics methods paper would land at ISMB.
  3. edgeR v4.x (Smyth lab, presented by Lizhong Chen at EuroBioC2025) — perennial; ISMB-class update plausible.
  4. msqrob2 (Vanderaa, Clement) — proteomics; CompMS COSI is the natural slot.
  5. iSEE + DeeDeeExperiment (Marini, Abassi) — BOSC.
  6. OSTA / Bioconductor spatial book (Dong, Patrick) — BOSC tutorial or session.
  7. Voyager / SpatialFeatureExperiment (Moses) — RegSys or MLCSB; spatial-feature-extraction story is now ISMB-class.
  8. sosta (Gunz, Robinson) — fresh from GBCC 2025; the Robinson lab typically files an ISMB proceedings for new spatial methods.
  9. DESpace + spatialFDA (Robinson lab) — proceedings paper plausible.
  10. plyxp (Landis, Love) — BOSC.
  11. signifinder (Pirrotta) — TransMed or BOSC.
  12. mia / miaverse (Borman, Lahti) — Microbiome COSI + BOSC.
  13. footprintR (Soneson) — RegSys.
  14. atena (Castelo) — BOSC.
  15. iscream (Eapen) — BOSC.
  16. MultiAssayExperiment / curatedTCGAData (Ramos Pérez) — BOSC.
  17. GAIA / GalaxyMCP (Goecks, Qiu, Baker, Schatz) — BOSC + AI/agent tutorial spillover.
  18. fishpond / DRIMSeq-adjacent DTU (Love, Campillo) — RegSys.

New ISMB-debuting candidates (predicted from current preprint flow / lab pipelines; not confirmed):

  1. Foundation-model adapters for single-cell (scGPT, Geneformer, UCE follow-ups) — MLCSB is the natural venue. Several Zitnik-lab and Troyanskaya-lab tools likely to anchor MLCSB sessions.
  2. Therapeutic-design generative models (Zitnik lab keynote spinouts) — MLCSB + Industry.
  3. Variant effect predictors leveraging structure (post-AlphaFold class) — VarI + 3DSIG cross-listed.
  4. Pan-genome / Burrows-Wheeler successor tooling (Durbin keynote sets the agenda) — HiTSeq.
  5. Microbiome foundation models / cross-cohort harmonization — Microbiome COSI.
  6. Cancer-microbiome causal inference tools — Microbiome + TransMed.
  7. Spatial-imaging foundation models / pathology-image LLMs — MLCSB (CHIEF / GigaPath / Virchow successor class).
  8. Agentic AI for bioinformatics workflows — Tutorial IP1 + IP2 + Industry Workshop; tools like Biomni-class assistants likely featured.
  9. Quantum-multi-omics methods — Q4LS track; novel category not in corpus.
  10. Tech Track demos (Mon) — typically commercial / cloud platform demos; selectively triage.

Tutorials as tool pages (Sunday Jul 12, IP1–IP9 — 9 entries):

  1. IP1 Agentic AI for In Silico Team Science (LLM-to-lab-assistant) — likely an open-source agent framework
  2. IP2 LLMs and Agentic AI for Biomedical Informatics
  3. IP3 From Trees to Networks (phylogenetics → networks)
  4. IP4 Generating realistic synthetic biological data using phylogenetics
  5. IP5 Computational Network Analysis of Omics Data
  6. IP6 Cytoscape + NDEx network biology workflows (anchors Cytoscape ecosystem)
  7. IP7 Quantum Computing for Multi-omics
  8. IP8 Metagenomic sequence analysis using k-mer based methods (likely sourmash / kraken-class)
  9. IP9 Biophysical ML for NGS sequence recognition

Excluded from initial tool-page pass:

  • Keynotes (handled in keynotes/ directory, not tools/)
  • DREAM Challenge presentations (handled separately as a topic page; outcomes ≠ tools)
  • Student Council Symposium (Sunday) — early-career; selectively triage post-meeting
  • Career Symposium (Tuesday) — not a tools venue
  • Equity track (Thursday) — not a tools venue
  • Most Tech Track talks (vendor demos; selectively triage based on open-source artifacts)

Open follow-ups before bulk extraction

  1. Watch for accepted-proceedings list — author notifications May 5, 2026; OUP Bioinformatics supplement typically posts ~mid-June. URL to monitor: academic.oup.com/bioinformatics + ISCB announcements feed.
  2. Per-COSI speaker rosters. Microbiome and EvolCompGen sites already have shells; MLCSB / RegSys / VarI / TransMed / BOSC typically populate June 2026. Re-fetch:
  3. microbiome-cosi.org/ismb-2026/overview
  4. evolcompgen.org/ismb_2026
  5. cosi.iscb.org/wiki/MLCSB:Home
  6. open-bio.org/events/bosc-2026/bosc-2026-keynotes/
  7. Tutorial syllabi (IP1–IP9). Typically post 3–4 weeks pre-meeting on the ISCB tutorials page; needed for the "Tutorial-as-tool-page" entries.
  8. bioRxiv "to appear in ISMB 2026" preprints — cross-search bioRxiv for the "Comments: To appear in ISMB 2026 proceedings" tag; useful for getting paper-and-code links before the OUP supplement is online.
  9. Slide DOIs (post-meeting). No ISMB-wide Zenodo community; check (a) zenodo.org/communities/bioconductor for BOSC speakers, (b) individual lab sites, (c) ISCB Nucleus on-demand for video links.
  10. CollaborationFest (CoFest) Jul 17–18. Parallel to GBCC2025 CoFest; produces concrete "wrapped tool" artifacts. Worth a 1-day post-conference scan for new Galaxy/Bioconductor wrappers, scverse↔Bioconductor bridges, or MCP-style integrations.
  11. Cross-link map. Build the EuroBioC2025 ↔ GBCC2025 ↔ ISMB 2026 ↔ BioC2026 cross-link table once the ISMB roster is firm; populate the "Mentioned elsewhere" cell on each tool page.
  12. AACR cross-link mirror policy. Decide (see tools/index.md Open Q2) whether AACR posters citing an ISMB-released tool get an AACR-vault stub page or just a cross-link line — applies broadly to Bustamante / Troyanskaya / Zitnik lab spinouts.