News

Building an ambitious new digital capability for Australian life science research

 

19/11/2019

The Australian Bioinformatics Commons (BioCommons) is an ambitious new digital capability that will enhance Australian researchers’ ability to understand the molecular basis of life across environmental, agricultural and biomedical science. 

Bioplatforms Australia and partners (including QCIF) are making this large-scale investment in digital infrastructure to ensure Australian life science research remains globally competitive, providing access to the tools, methods and training researchers require to respond to national challenges such as food security, environmental conservation and disease treatments.
 
The BioCommons will inform the development of a new capability for the estimated 30,000 publicly-funded bioscience researchers in Australia. It will also investigate and provide recommendations for the services and tools that are needed to make sense of data on subjects such as DNA sequencing, proteomic and metabolic analysis at scale.
 
The first phase of the BioCommons will actively engage the Australian bioscience community to deliver:

• an operating infrastructure providing a core set of bioinformatics services
• a set of research activities and associated communities providing exemplars for others to follow
• a consortium of participants providing guidance and implementation support
• a strategic plan for the BioCommons
• a five-year operational plan for the delivery of the Commons (through to 2023).

QCIF is actively involved in the creation and operation of the BioCommons through participation in multiple activities. These include:

• planning and community engagement undertaken by the BioCommons Hub team
• operating and extending core BioCommons services for data analysis, such as Galaxy Australia
• designing community-scale systems for non-model organism de novo genome assembly and annotation  
• enabling Queensland-based researchers to participate in national bioinformatics training activities organised by the BioCommons team, through the participation of QCIF members UQ, USQ and JCU.

The Australian BioCommons is supported by Bioplatforms Australia, which is itself supported by the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).