Technical specialists at Australian BioCommons used the Globus service over the AARNet network to rapidly migrate 15 TB of research data for the Apollo platform with minimal disruption.

Are you interested in joining this year’s BioHackathon Europe, but can’t face the long haul flights? You should join the Australian Outpost team who will gather to work locally, while checking in regularly with our international colleagues.

A new online tutorial is taking researchers back to basics to uncover the principles of phylogenetics and how tree-building methods work thanks to a longstanding collaboration between Professor Michael Charleston from the University of Tasmania and Australian BioCommons.

Galaxy Australia has been updated with two powerful software packages installed and fully subsidised for Australian researchers to use.

Teaching genetics is easier and more effective now that a powerful online tool is being made available to Australian researchers and trainers through a new feature of the Australian Apollo Service.

An off-the-shelf bioinformatics workflow for genome assembly from HiFi read data is now available and has been specifically tailored for Australian researchers through a collaboration between BioCommons and the Australian Genomics Research Facility.

Meet us at booth 27 of the 23rd International Congress of Genetics, which is being held in Melbourne, Australia from 16-21 July 2023. You can find out about our activities in building bioinformatics infrastructure to support human health, agricultural and environmental science research, and discuss the challenges researchers face. We’ll showcase the services that the BioCommons and our partners offer and we would love to hear your feedback!

The new Galaxy Australia Genome Lab is now available for use by the Australian genomics community. This customised, user-friendly workbench provides rapid access to a range of sophisticated resources needed for genome assembly and annotation.

We are proud to support the Australian Pest Genome Partnership through which we, along with partners CSIRO and ARDC, work towards making genomic data more easily accessible and usable to support industry, government and the scientific community in managing pests. This project will ultimately share the genomic data that will underpin species-specific management of pests & weeds in the future. Interactive browsing and collaborative curation of the assembled and annotated genomes will be available via the Australian Apollo Service.

Australian BioCommons took part in the development of prototype components of the proposed National Approach to Genomic Information Management research ecosystem. The collaborative submission made by our Human Genomes Platform Project and the University of Melbourne Centre for Cancer Research’s returned very favourable reviews in the Preliminary Implementation Recommendations to the Australian Government (April 2022) recently released by Australian Genomics.

Australian BioCommons is thrilled to announce the launch of the Australian Apollo Service in partnership with QCIF and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre. This new service offers access to the popular tool, Apollo, which facilitates real-time collaborative curation and genome annotation editing, along with a valuable layer of IT support. The Australian Apollo Service allows researchers to focus on the genome annotation curation itself by taking care of all the system administration and hosting customised, local instances of Apollo.

A new genome assembly and annotation promises insights into the genetic foundations of economically valuable traits in tea tree (Melaleuca alternifolia). The team at Southern Cross University’ responsible for A high-quality draft genome for Melaleuca alternifolia (tea tree): a new platform for evolutionary genomics of myrtaceous terpene-rich species made excellent use of national research infrastructure provided by Australian BioCommons, including Galaxy Australia and soon-to-be-launched Fgenesh++ and Apollo services.

Australian BioCommons partners broadly in our efforts to drive coordinated solutions to life science researchers’ problems. Genomics for Australian Plants (GAP) is developing genomics resources to enhance our understanding of the evolution and conservation of the unique Australian flora. GAP’s phylogenomics bioinformatics working group has combined newly developed and existing scripts into an integrated workflow for the assembly of target capture data.

Keen to share these resources with researchers who can use them, the group has been working with BioCommons to offer a series of events to train others in using these novel pipelines. Theoretical webinars and hands-on training workshops will be delivered virtually in conjunction with the upcoming Australasian Systematic Botany Society Conference.

We were pleased to see one of our close partners recently awarded a grant to extend on a highly collaborative BioCommons project. Dominique Gorse from QCIF, along with Sandie Degnan and Bernie Degnan from the School of Biological Sciences at UQ, received support for Developing a scalable genome browser and interactive repository for large and complex multi-omic datasets from non-model organisms of environmental and economic importance.

Read on to hear how their 2021 UQ Genome Informatics Hub (GIH) collaborative project, it will deliver an interactive repository for diverse transcriptomic, chromatin-state and proteomic data and will be immediately populated with existing genomes of two Great Barrier Reef animals: the notorious destroyer of coral reefs, the crown-of-thorns starfish and a model for animal evolution, the sponge Amphimedon queenslandica”.