Accelerating deep learning in Australian structural biology research
Enabled by rapid advances in deep learning methods for protein structure prediction, computational structural biology is driving major innovations in life sciences research. However, making effective use of these technologies requires cutting-edge software, highly specialised hardware, and interdisciplinary expertise.
To tackle these challenges, a passionate group of researchers officially formed the Australian Structural Biology Computing (ASBC) community in early 2025. Supported by BioCommons, this community-led initiative set out to share computational knowledge, methods and resources. Less than a year later, we can already see the value they bring to the Australian research sector.
How has the ASBC community grown?
Since its formation, the community has been moving quickly to address the needs identified in the Australian Structural Biology Deep-Learning Infrastructure Roadmap. The roadmap has already demonstrated its value to the sector, having been viewed over 1,100 times and downloaded over 900 times, in addition to being used in funding applications and publications.
To further connect researchers, BioCommons assisted in the development of a new Community Platform website that is now live, serving as a virtual hub for all users in Australia, with new resources and opportunities for contributions being added to the platform over time.
What training and resources are now available?
Capacity building has been a key focus for the ASBC community, and they have been integral to several key activities in 2025:
The community was instrumental in providing expertise for the ‘Leveraging deep learning to design custom protein-binding proteins’ webinar series, coordinated by BioCommons and featuring five individual guest speakers across the program of events
The facilitation of a 2025 ABACBS workshop ‘Leveraging peak Australian compute to enable workflows for predictive structural biology at scale’ to help researchers run protein prediction workflows on Australia’s peak high-performance computing (HPC) systems.
Collaborating with EMBL-EBI to develop the self-paced ‘Foundations in Structural Biology’ module (available now) for a global audience.
Get involved
Learn more and join the ASBC community
Investigate ways to engage with the community and its resources: https://www.biocommons.org.au/structural-biology
