by Charlie Harrison

On the 4th September the UKRI Digital Skills Catalyst hosted AICatalyst2026, an AI in the Biosciences training conference, in the historic Guildhall in York. The event was open to PhD students, postgraduates, and professionals at all career stages, with lunch and travel bursaries funded by AIBIO. The event was a huge success, with 140 registrations from 50 institutions across England, Scotland and Wales.

In the morning session there was an overview of large language models and their use in bioscience research from Dr Alistair Droop of the University of York, and Prof Elizabeth Sklar led an introduction to applications of AI in agriculture and food. ScryptIQ gave a taster of their supervised learning training course, and our very own Prof Andrew French shared tips for writing grants for interdisciplinary projects at the interface of AI and the biosciences. Alongside these talks was a double-length workshop on image analysis using the free, open-source Python tool napari, led by Prof Dave Cash and Dr Stella Prins of University College London.

The afternoon sessions introduced the FAIR principles for research data and code, courtesy of Evgenij Belikov at University of Edinburgh, and Dr Andrew Mason of University of York discussed biologically literate feature selection for machine learning. Dr Alessandra Vigilante from the Hub for Applied Bioinformatics at Kings College London discussed how AI is reshaping multiomics research, and Dr Khaled Jumah of the University of Bradford led an interactive workshop introducing the Galaxy platform for building, executing and sharing reproducible bioinformatics workflows.

Congratulations to the winners of the poster competition:

• 1st place: Arpit Jindal: From Biomass Waste to High Value Chemicals: Building Microbial Terpenoid Production Platform from Lignin
• 2nd place: Aishwarya Bhatta: Cartographic imprinting distance predicts influenza neutralisation responses in human serological data
• 3rd place: Wardah Almansaf: Analysing Volatile Compounds: A Comparison of Plant-Based Meat analogues and Beef

There were 31 poster submissions in all, spanning a wide range of subjects from human health and disease, agriculture and plant science, industrial and environmental biotechnology, and microbiology, and describing a fascinating array of data: MRI volumes, laser capture microscopy, robot-derived multispectral imagery, EEG, serological assays, genomic and transcriptomic sequences, soil physical measurements, and volatile compound profiles. This is a great showcase of the wealth of research activity and opportunity at the interface of AI and the biosciences.

The conference has many interesting and useful workshops and has increased my awareness for the use of AI in the biological science. I hope to return for the next event! I went into this workshop thinking it would only be lightly applicable to my current research, but I came away with a breadth of different skills and applications that I can apply to my research. Overall this workshop was highly enjoyable, set in a beautiful historic venue which made it even more special. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience and would highly recommend it to anyone working in data analysis or looking to work in data analysis.

A wonderful opportunity to gain insight from experts in the field. The organisers and facilitators were incredibly friendly, and it really felt like no question was a silly question.

I really enjoyed attending AICatalyst2026 because I learned about new tools such as Galaxy and MORF-Bio. The sessions on LLM for Biosciences, scryptIQ, and AI for Multiomics were very helpful and informative. I am keen to apply the knowledge and insights I gained to my research (Eleojo, AFTBios, Researcher)