Building a trusted ecosystem to accelerate research: the Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons

A new paper describing the progress and vision of the Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons (ACDC) project has been published in Nature Reviews Cardiology. This national-scale project is designed to accelerate the fight against Australia’s single biggest killer through creating a comprehensive, secure, scalable and internationally integrated data infrastructure, offering cardiovascular researchers around the world the opportunity to uncover the hidden drivers of disease risk and progression, as well as patient recovery and survivorship.

Authors Corey Giles and Peter J. Meikle from the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute (Baker Institute) describe how the ACDC project will provide researchers with secure access to pooled data from approximately 400,000 individuals across 18 clinical and population cohorts within Australia.

These cohorts contain a wealth of diverse information, including rich omics phenotyping, genotyping data, longitudinal cardiovascular outcomes, and comprehensive imaging data.

The path to a comprehensive, secure, scalable, and internationally integrated data infrastructure connected to global best practice analysis platforms includes many complex phases. Led by the Baker Institute, contributions from a diverse group of participants are co-ordinated by BioCommons. Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, ACvA, University of Sydney, 23Strands, CSL Limited, BioCommons, data custodians and other partners are working together on infrastructure establishment, cohort onboarding and harmonisation, testing, validation, use case exploration, user experience, documentation, training, governance and intellectual property arrangements. BioCommons leads the implementation of the critical digital infrastructure underpinning ACDC as part of the Australian BioCommons Human Genome Informatics activity.

The highly collaborative project receives advice and oversight from a multi-disciplinary Scientific Advisory Committee made up of clinicians, researchers, digital infrastructure experts, and consumer representatives. The group has representatives from BioCommons, Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, University of Sydney, University of Tasmania, Busselton Health Study, RENCI, NHLBI, University of Chicago, Broad Institute, HeartBeat Victoria, as well as a large number of data custodians. They are responsible for shaping the scientific objectives of the platform and providing feedback to the Project Management Committee to ensure that the development and implementation of the ACDC platform aligns with those objectives.

The ACDC project is synchronising the efforts and experiences of a large and diverse group of experts who together can advance the early detection of disease processes and the discovery of new disease-modifying pathways that contribute to cardiovascular disease development.

Read the paper Building the Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons.

Learn more about how BioCommons is implementing the ACDC infrastructure.

The ACDC project is led by the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute and funded by Bioplatforms Australia and the Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF 2022 National Critical Research Infrastructure Grant: Building an Australian Cardiovascular disease Data Commons). Additional contributions are being made by the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, ACvA, University of Sydney, 23Strands, CSL Limited, Australian BioCommons, data custodians and other partners.

Taking Nextflow to the next level: HPC Workshop applications now open

Life sciences research increasingly depends on analysing large and complex datasets. Tools like the workflow management system, Nextflow, can make this process reproducible, scalable, and efficient. But for many researchers, getting started with Nextflow can feel like a daunting leap.

Earlier this year the Nextflow for Life Sciences workshop introduced the fundamental principles of Nextflow pipeline development and guided newcomers to build reproducible and scalable scientific workflows with Nextflow, creating a multi-sample Nextflow workflow for RNAseq data preparation as an example. Led by trainers from the Australian BioCommons team at SIH, University of Sydney and supported by the National Bioinformatics Training Cooperative, 90 learners gathered at satellite sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra and Perth, giving researchers the chance to connect locally with peers while benefitting from the national-level training.

Participants praised the balance of theory and practice, and nearly 90% of attendees rated the content as “very good” or “excellent”. A key highlight was the use of research-relevant datasets that empower scientists to apply their new skills directly to their work. As one participant reflected, “I got lots of knowledge on how to build my own Nextflow pipeline. The RNAseq example was fantastic - so many workshops use ‘Hello World’ examples that are impossible to scale up.”

We are excited to announce that applications are now open for our follow up workshop Nextflow on HPC to be held in November. This hands-on workshop will will provide participants with the practical skills to configure, optimise, and troubleshoot Nextflow pipelines for efficient and scalable execution on High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems.

Participants can expect to learn how to identify the differences between traditional HPC job submission and workflow execution via Nextflow, and how to best configure and execute scalable Nextflow workflows on HPC systems. Managing software environments using tools like singularity, and adapt these to fit within different HPC ecosystem constraints will be covered, along with tips on troubleshooting Nextflow workflows on HPC systems.

To make the most of this workshop you’ll need to have experience running simple Nextflow pipelines, and be looking to scale up your workflows to an HPC environment. You will be supported with access to national Tier 1 computing resources at Pawsey and NCI, so you must be associated with an Australian organisation.

These Nextflow workshops are part of Australian BioCommons’ mission to make advanced bioinformatics tools more accessible to researchers across the country. By combining national expertise with local support, this training is helping build capacity and strengthen the life sciences community.

Find out more about the workshop and submit your application: Nextflow on HPC.

Applications close 3 November 2025.

Leading sessions and launching tools: a packed schedule of upcoming events

The final quarter is always a busy time of year for conferences in our sector, but the activities surrounding International Data Week (IDW) 2025 in Brisbane this October have really raised the bar! The BioCommons team is leveraging the opportunity to share, learn and collaborate across a multitude of different events.

IDW takes place every two years and is hosted for the first time in Australia by Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). Jointly organised by the International Science Council’s Committee on Data (CODATA) and World Data System (WDS), and the Research Data Alliance (RDA), IDW will combine the Research Data Alliance Plenary Meeting with SciDataCon.

The RDA Plenary Meeting is a biannual meeting of the international member organisation working to develop and support global infrastructure facilitating data sharing and reuse. BioCommons Director, Dr Jeff Christiansen will co-lead the interest group meeting, Linking Pixels, Proteins & Populations: Integrating Data Across Life Science Domains. Prof Bernie Pope, A/Director, Human Genome Informatics (HGI), will deliver a Plenary with international colleagues: Open Research and Federated Systems: Disciplinary, Regional and International Perspectives. Bernie says he’s “thrilled to discuss the remarkable growth in research programs within Australia, driven by cutting-edge omics technologies. The current human omics research ecosystem is facing significant infrastructure challenges due to the explosion of complex data. This situation creates an urgent need for coordinated investment and scaling.”

SciDataCon addresses the frontier issues of data in research, and Jeff will co-lead the session, Digital Research Infrastructure Supporting FAIR, Reproducible and Impactful Research: A Global Ecosystem of Tools, Resources and Skills. The full-featured Australian Reference Genome Atlas (ARGA) app will be officially launched on Day 1 with The Australian Reference Genome Atlas: supercharged exploratory infrastructure for national-scale genomic data discovery.

There are several co-located events taking place in October, including the foundingGIDE community event. The community aims to establish a Global Image Data Ecosystem (GIDE) by developing common recommendations for metadata and interoperability in biological imaging, and have invited BioCommons Research Community Engagement Lead, Dr Johan Gustafsson, to contribute to the foundingGIDE Community Event Program to speak about Galaxy and WorkflowHub: Open Access to Large-Scale Image Analysis Workflows.

The following week in Brisbane, many of the BioCommons team will join eResearch Australasia, hosted by Australasian eResearch Organisations (AeRO) Inc. BioCommons Scientific Business Analyst, Keeva Connolly will present Harmonising metadata to improve data discoverability and interoperability, complementing the presentation from Dr Kathryn Hall and BioCommons authors, The importance of being indexed: introducing Genome Tracker by the Australian Reference Genome Atlas. BioCommons Software Engineering Group Lead, Amanda Zhu, is presenting Towards a Unified Access Infrastructure for Australia’s Life Sciences Platforms, and will be joined by many other BioCommons people at the conference.

Some BioCommons team members are travelling further afield, with Irene Hung, HGI Senior Project Manager, attending the Global Alliance for Genomics & Health (GA4GH) 13th Plenary Meeting in Uppsala, Sweden, to present a poster on the GUARDIANS program. Dr Tom Harrop, Senior Bioinformatician and Lead for the BioCommons Australian Tree of Life (AToL) project, will travel to Berlin for the BioHackathon Europe 2025. He will co-lead a project and ensure a close connection is maintained with the Australian Outpost of this event. Tom will also visit the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and the Darwin Tree of Life Project (DToL) in the UK, ensuring alignment of AToL with these major international genomic initiatives.

Our team attends these meetings hoping to engage with our different communities, so we look forward to catching up with many of you in person!

From cancer genomics to evolutionary biology: how ABLeS is powering Australian research

A recent wave of publications, spanning the fields of conservation genomics, precision oncology, and evolutionary biology, highlight the growing impact of the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS) program. These studies demonstrate the breadth of data-intensive challenges being tackled by Australian researchers, and showcase how streamlined access to national supercomputing resources is accelerating life sciences research across the country.

Recent highlights include:

• Australian plant evolution: a phylogenomic analysis has clarified the complex evolutionary history of the native plant genus Teucrium, highlighting repeated colonisation of the continent and the development of unique adaptations to the arid Australian environment.

• ABLeS enables access to 3 TB long term storage, 2 TB temporary storage on scratch and 100 KSUs per quarter.

• Childhood precision oncology: in a study of high-risk paediatric tumours, researchers demonstrated that RNA-seq provides additional functional insights into mutation pathogenicity and that it is an indispensable companion to whole genome sequencing in precision medicine.

• ABLeS enables access to 1 TB temporary storage, 5 TB long term storage and 100 KSUs per quarter.

• Respiratory medicine: the study outlines observations regarding the significant overlap in gene expression and network structure between paired amniotic and nasal epithelial samples, supporting the potential of the amnion as a non-invasive and abundant tissue surrogate for investigating the respiratory system of newborns.

• ABLeS enables access to unlimited temporary storage on scratch, 5 TB permanent storage and 50 KSUs per quarter.

A group of papers have been published are from partners involved in the Australian Amphibian and Reptile Genomics Initiative (AusARG), Bioplatforms Australia’s national collaborative project facilitating research using genomics approaches towards a more thorough understanding of evolution and conservation of Australia’s unique native amphibians and reptiles that are now under threat, through climate, disease or habitat modification:

• Australian alpine skink: researchers present a chromosome-scale genomic assembly for the Australian alpine skink Bassiana duperreyi, which provides a crucial resource for research into thermolabile sex reversal in this threatened species.

• Central bearded dragon: the study describes a new, near telomere-to-telomere phased genome assembly for the central bearded dragon Pogona vitticeps, to serve as a resource to enable and accelerate research into the unusual reproductive attributes of the species, such as temperature-dependant sex reversal.

• Dragon lizards: a new phylogenomic tree shows that the colonisation of Australia by Amphibolurinae dragon lizards (Family Agamidae) was followed by rapid morphological expansion, which was facilitated by a transition from a tree-living ancestor to a generalist form before specialisation.

• ABLeS enables access to 135 TB long term storage, 1 TB temporary storage on scratch and 100 KSUs per quarter.

Australian central bearded dragon, Pogona vitticeps

As BioCommons’ Product Manager, Bioinformatics Platforms, Dr Ziad Al Bkhetan has supported these projects since they started using the ABLeS service:

“It is incredibly rewarding to see the direct connection between facilitating computational resources and the fascinating science that follows. Through ABLeS, we have been able to help researchers build foundational genomes for unique Australian reptiles, and then see other teams use the technology to gain insights into treating childhood cancers. Our goal is to enable these communities to take advantage of the incredible research infrastructure we have here in Australia, and these papers showcase the success of our partnerships through the program.”  

These diverse studies are just a few examples of how the ABLeS program is providing Australian researchers with the vital, large-scale computational power needed to tackle complex bioinformatic challenges. By providing access to Australia’s Tier 1 high-performance computing facilities, ABLeS offers a streamlined pathway for research communities to harness national infrastructure and accelerate their discoveries.

Learn more about ABLeS

ABLeS is co-funded by Bioplatforms Australia, National Computational Infrastructure and Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre.

Cancer researchers level up their high performance computing

Researchers investigating cancer evolution and treatment resistance have successfully leveraged the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS) program to expand their high-performance computing (HPC) capabilities.

A group within the Computational Biology Program at Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, led by Dr Anna Trigos, were offered guidance and access to national HPC resources through ABLeS. The Trigos Lab was supported to begin utilising the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre which significantly enhanced the lab's computational prowess.

The ABLeS experience helped the researchers to gain proficiency working portably across multiple large HPC environments, including a better understanding of the differences between their on-premise HPC and Pawsey’s Setonix, different scratch storage limitations, the portability and reproducibly benefits of setting up and utilising containers and Conda on HPC, as well as improving data management skills.

Members of the Trigos Lab Research group

The work served as a crucial feasibility study, providing insights that paved the way for the Trigos Lab to formally integrate external HPC resources into their research workflows. It also provided a vital head start for success in the competitive National Computational Merit Allocation Scheme.

Anna explained, “My team could demonstrate they could set up, test, benchmark, and optimise Nextflow pipelines critical for ongoing data processing. This experience put us in the right position to submit our first application for national compute, which was successful.”

Sharing her experiences with other ABLeS participants at the recent ABLeS User Meeting, Anna was happy to report the success of her Honours student David Le, whose analysis and simulation of 3D spatial cancer tissue data benefited greatly from the increased computational power.

The Trigos Lab focuses on understanding treatment resistance and response through the lens of both cancer evolution and ecosystems. While their primary focus is on multiple myeloma and prostate cancer, they also apply their methods to other cancers. They utilise omics data, including genomics, transcriptomics, epigenomics, and single-cell data, as well as patient imaging. Their methodology incorporates bioinformatics, computational biology, engineering, statistics, deep learning, and now HPC.

Learn more about Anna Trigos’ Multi-omic Evolution and Ecosystems Lab

Learn more about the Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS)

DAWN of a new era for international wheat research

The enduring management of valuable genomics data can be a challenge as time goes on. The Diversity Among Wheat geNomes (DAWN) resource continues to yield valuable insights into the diversity among wheat genomes years after its initial creation, and is hosted on the Australian Apollo Service to ensure sustained and stable access for the international wheat research community.

DAWN supports the exploration of the genetics of wheat strains by providing an accessible way to visualise and compare the Trictium aestivum (bread wheat) genomes and associated data, such as protein-coding regions (exome capture data) and gene expression (RNA-seq data) to further understand genetic diversity. Researchers importantly now have the capability of collaboratively annotating wheat genomes and editing their models using the Apollo software. 

The original developer of DAWN, Dr Nathan Watson-Haigh, supported the capability expansion from static visualisations to collaborative annotations and is pleased to see researchers making excellent use of the resource. Rudi Appels, Professor (Honorary), University of Melbourne, Research Fellow, AgriBio, Latrobe University, is leveraging both the Australian Apollo Service and DAWN to continually identify and update variable regions in the wheat genome.

Rudi has witnessed rapid advances over his years involved in the research of the large and complex wheat genome, overcoming challenges in sequencing, assembly and analysis. He reflects that new tools offer new opportunities for increased engagement amongst researchers, which in turn supports better research outputs.

“For the analysis of the large datasets that underpin wheat genomes, the Apollo software has provided the much needed support for biology-oriented researchers such as myself. The Apollo software speaks in a visual language that enables biologists to communicate with their bioinformatics colleagues at a level normally reserved for computational and bioinformatics experts. Real-time sharing is now feasible too, which allows communal activity during teaching or working with colleagues.”

The ability to collaboratively improve genome annotations using Apollo fast-tracks advances. Computer-generated gene models based on work from other organisms such as rice, barley and Arabidopsis can provide a first approximation of structure. Using Apollo, RNA transcript data can be easily integrated to edit missing sections of genes, correct naming of genes, amend intron-exon structure details, and investigate sections of the genome sequence not tackled by the automated methods.

Read more about DAWN, Rudi’s research, or Apollo, or apply for your own access to the fully-subsided Australian Apollo Service.

BioCommons partners with QCIF to manage the Australian Apollo Service, which is underpinned by computational resources provided by AARNET’s ARDC Nectar Research Cloud node. These efforts are supported by funding from Bioplatforms Australia and the Queensland Government RICF. Bioplatforms is enabled by NCRIS.

Join the Australian Outpost of BioHackathon Europe 2025

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.

This is a unique opportunity to participate in a significant global event and network with your international peers while working intensively on practical bioinformatics challenges. We will cover your costs when you come to Melbourne for the duration of ELIXIR’s BioHackathon: 3 Nov to 7 Nov 2025. Participation will work mostly within our business hours, plus catch up live in the early evening with the teams in Berlin. We always make it fun, and you’ll get to know others from around Australia while you learn new skills.

We’ve narrowed down the projects we’re interested in, and want to hear what you want the Australian Outpost of the BioHackathon to work on: 

• Automatic workflow for benchmarking BUSCO genes for phylogenomics

• Streamlining FAIR Metadata for Biodiversity Genome Annotations

• Expanding the Benchmarking Landscape for Long-Read-Transcriptomics including Novel Datasets and Pipelines

• METRICS - Monitoring of Key Performance Indicators for ELIXIR Services

BioHackathon aims to:

• Advance the development of an open source infrastructure for data integration to accelerate scientific innovation

• Engage technical people in the bioinformatics community to work together on topics of common interest

• Strengthen interactions, establish and reinforce collaborations through hands-on programming activities.

Please contact us if you are interested in joining the Australian Outpost of the BioHackathon Europe, and tell us which project/s you would like to participate in, and why. You can read last year’s story and a participant's blog post on why attending is so valuable for inspiration. Once we get a feel for who is interested, we will select a team of people and organise our meetup. There’s no need to register for a place on the BioHackathon Europe website - they have reserved places for the Australian Outpost.

Expressions of interest have now closed

Deep dive into international research infrastructure: insights from the ELIXIR All Hands Meeting in Greece

Dr Andrea Guzmán Mesa, ELIXIR International Relations Officer, meets with Conrad, Steven and Christina from BioCommons

Each year, BioCommons sends representatives to the ELIXIR All Hands Meeting, an event that brings together over 400 international peers. This attendance is a valuable outcome of the Collaboration Agreement between BioCommons and ELIXIR, which allows for the extension of knowledge-sharing opportunities.

ELIXIR is a life sciences infrastructure that shares many functional similarities and interests with BioCommons, but on a vast Europe-wide scale. It brings together a workforce from over 240 research institutes spread over 21 member countries. The opportunity to have deep discussions on research infrastructure topics and leverage the experience of this specialist workforce is shared around the BioCommons team each year.

This year Dr Christina Hall (Assoc Director - Training and Communications), Dr Steven Manos (Assoc Director - BioCloud) and Dr Conrad Leonard (Technical Lead, Human Genome Informatics) travelled to Thessaloniki, Greece, to participate. 

As the organiser of the Australian Outpost of the annual BioHackathon Europe, Christina was invited to lead a workshop on ‘Enriching the virtual biohackathon experience’, along with Eva Alloza from the Spanish National Bioinformatics Institute. The collaborative workshop sought to gather recommendations for practices to support virtual participation at hackathon-style events.

Invited speakers from the Health Data Research UK, Barcelona Supercomputing  Center (Spain), ELIXIR Germany, Center for Genomic Regulation (Spain), Chiba University (Japan), ELIXIR Hub, and Australian BioCommons, shared many examples of hacking events that welcome virtual participation. The outcomes will soon be shared as a ‘cheatsheet’ for project managers of the upcoming BioHackathon Europe to support better virtual experiences for participants including those joining from Australia.

Australian BioCommons was mentioned in many different contexts during various sessions of the three-day meeting. Christina presented BioCommons as an example of ELIXIR’s international impact and she also formed part of the training panel discussion ELIXIR training services: a roadmap towards 2028 and the EOSC context.

Steven’s key focus was the interaction between communities and platforms. He emphasised that "consulting with communities - groups with shared needs who converge around special interests - is invaluable because they sit in between research infrastructures and the rest of the world." An interesting observation shared at the meeting was that communities, while keenly aware of their domain's needs and standards, often don’t know what’s happening in other platforms and believe their challenges require unique platforms. This frequently contrasts with the views of platform developers, who tend to deliver generic solutions lacking the flexibility and extensibility that communities need.

The meeting's collaborative and positive atmosphere always fosters forward-thinking approaches to take back to our own circumstances. For instance, there were discussions about how the common tendency to break down problems and solve individual steps could be enhanced by a concerted effort to consolidate solutions into a cohesive package as a final step. Additionally, adopting common vocabulary, easier-to-understand language, and good documentation were acknowledged as crucial. Engaging more researcher champions to liaise with communities was also recognised as very important.

For Conrad, a dominant theme was data interoperability and federation, with multiple sessions highlighting streamlined data flow, service accessibility, and the importance of collaboration. Excellent examples of FAIR principles in practice were showcased across data, software, and training. Another significant focus was on the challenges associated with managing sensitive data. Updates on secure research data environments, legal frameworks, and trustworthy access and analysis were particularly informative. The evolving role of AI was a strong and broadly discussed theme.

Staying current in a broad range of research infrastructure topics is challenging, and directly supported by opportunities like participating in this annual ELIXIR meeting. It provided a valuable opportunity to connect with European peers, gain insights into a wide range of current activities, share our experiences, and engage in deep discussions on topics of mutual interest.

Read more about the meeting in ELIXIR’s news story.

Thousands join international Galaxy training events

The Galaxy platform is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. This collaborative data analysis platform is widely used by scientists around the world, and underpins many computational biology services. Galaxy Australia is one of the core services BioCommons delivers, so naturally we provide lots of opportunities for researchers to engage with the team, community and tools.

The Galaxy Australia team recently supported the Singapore Biology League, who chose to incorporate Galaxy into their online collaborative biology contest for the first time. This massive event welcomed over 2000 pre-university students who formed teams to run 2054 tools on Galaxy Australia over 4 hours. It was a great opportunity to broaden participants’ exposure to biology and bioinformatics beyond the school curriculum.

The week-long Galaxy Training Academy attracted more than 3500 people from across the globe this year. Seventy three Australian researchers were amongst the international cohort joining from their homes and offices to work through tutorials, with support as they needed it. Live help was provided in our time zones by Galaxy Australia’s Dr Anna Syme, Dr Igor Makunin and Dr Tristan Reynolds, who fielded questions on a wide range of topics from fungal genomics to bat ecology! Participants brought their own specialities as they learned how to use the fully subsidised Galaxy Australia platform for proteomics, genome assembly, transcriptomics, single cell RNAseq, microbiome analysis, machine learning and more. 

In the lead up to the Galaxy Training Academy, BioCommons’ Dr Tiffanie Nelson and Galaxy Australia’s Dr Tristan Reynolds helped researchers understand what’s possible by presenting the webinar: No code, no problem: data analysis for biologists with Galaxy Australia. Examples included how Galaxy Australia is being used for biosecurity screening, foodborne pathogen detection and building reference genomes of the critically endangered swift parrot, as well as a tour of the practical features of Galaxy Australia that make sophisticated workflows like these accessible to all, regardless of their computational skills. 

Get started by exploring the tutorials available: Galaxy Training Network 
If you’re an existing Galaxy Australia user, improve your methods with our Top Tips videos

Key elements to unlocking deep learning for structural biology identified by the Australian research community

In an inspired demonstration of collaboration, the Australian Structural Biology Computing Community has come together to publish the Australian Structural Biology Deep-Learning Infrastructure Roadmap. Taking a holistic view, that includes the existing challenges, critical research bottlenecks, and looking forward to a potential national strategy, this new research infrastructure roadmap has been developed by the community, for the community. 

Enabled by advances in deep learning methods for protein structure prediction and de novo protein design, computational structural biology has rapidly emerged as a powerful technology driving innovation in both fundamental and translational science. The technology underpins breakthroughs in drug design, diagnostics, personalised medicine, and synthetic biology, though a limitation has been that effective use requires concentrated interdisciplinary expertise and access to specialised hardware.

To understand these challenges, the Australian Structural Biology Computing (ASBC) Community was formed and has come together to lead a national, collaborative approach. This community-driven initiative, partnered with Australian BioCommons, brings together a diverse group of experts from leading institutions around the country. Authors of the roadmap represent Structural Biology Facility, Mark Wainwright Analytical Centre at the University of New South Wales, Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, University of Queensland, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), the National Computational Infrastructure, Sydney Informatics Hub and the School of Medical Sciences at the University of Sydney, School of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Melbourne, and the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute at Monash University. 

The roadmap outlines key deliverables that will expedite the availability and accessibility of structural biology approaches to researchers nationwide: 

• A dedicated community space to foster collaboration and share best-practice recommendations for software deployments, benchmarking, validations and insights developed within the community. 

• Community training resources to on-board diverse stakeholders within the context of computational structural biology and strengthen the national impact of community expertise. For example, the Leveraging deep learning to design custom protein-binding proteins webinar series.

• National computational infrastructure built on increased hardware investment and a user platform to facilitate efficient, high-throughput utilisation of national computing resources and drive translational outcomes enabled by curated and validated computational structural biology technologies. 

• Alignment, integration and engagement with global best-practice efforts for computational structural biology infrastructure and research. 

A robust, sovereign capability in computational structural biology and protein design will position Australian universities, research institutes, and industry at the forefront of global innovation.

Read the Australian Structural Biology Deep-Learning Infrastructure Roadmap 

Join the Australian Structural Biology Computing Community 

Watch the Community’s webinar series Leveraging deep learning to design custom protein-binding proteins