News

New investment to tackle the data challenges of bioscience researchers

 
26/02/2020

A new investment from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) will enable significant expansion of the Australian BioCommons ‘Bring Your Own Data (BYOD)’ platform.

The investment will enable the integration of data-generating instruments across genomics, proteomics and metabolomics, enhance accessibility to high-priority reference data, and manage access to compute infrastructures. It will support a wide range of Australian life science researchers by:

  • Improving and expanding the established highly accessible Graphical User Interface (GUI)-based BYOD platform (Galaxy Australia), that gives all life sciences researchers, including informaticians, access to a well-structured, world’s-best-practice bioinformatics workbench for research and training.
  • Developing a complementary Command Line Interface (CLI)-focused BYOD platform, which will provide a scalable and flexible set of open programmatic resources to create, access and exchange workflows, tools and training across any national and institutional compute infrastructures.
  • Developing a pan-national data infrastructure that will connect -omics instruments and reference data sets to the analysis infrastructure, underpinned by a capability to transport data nationally and internationally.

Early last year, discipline-focused research-orientated platforms were invited to apply for ARDC investment to support better connections between data-related resources, industry and researchers.
 
The Australian BioCommons submitted an application involving eight partner organisations: Bioplatforms Australia, Australian Access Federation, AARNet, National Computational Infrastructure, University of Sydney, University of Melbourne, QCIF and Pawsey Supercomputing Centre.
 
The proposal, the BioCommons Bring Your Own Data (BYOD) Expansion Project, detailed how this group would work together to build on the foundational work already being coordinated through the BioCommons.
 
We are delighted the Australian BioCommons proposal has been successful in securing investment through the ARDC platforms program.
 
A version of this article was first published on the Australian Biocommons website on Thursday, 19 December 2019.