Partners meet to start building the digital infrastructure needed for human genomics research though GUARDIANS

A diverse group came together, including special guest Dr Melissa Konopko from ELIXIR who is standing here with BioCommons’ Prof Bernie Pope.

Australian researchers are set to make significant strides in discovering, accessing, and analysing human genomics data. The first in-person meeting of a significant new collaboration brought together partners who are committed to implementing the Australian BioCommons’ GUARDIANS program.

The meeting in Sydney represented the start of two years of implementation work as part of the GUARDIANS mission to empower Australian researchers to easily and securely discover, access, analyse and use human genomics data across national infrastructure, using the latest tools and resources.

The project brings Australian BioCommons together with Australian Access Federation, Children's Cancer Institute / ZERO, Garvan Institute of Medical Research, National Computational Infrastructure (NCI), QIMR Berghofer Institute of Medical Research, University of Melbourne, and University of Sydney. The project builds on years of foundational work in the Human Genomes Platform Project which also included a funded program and contracted schedules of work with partners. 

This first GUARDIANS meeting helped to build a sense of shared purpose as the group established effective ways of working together across their diverse organisations. Explorations into the policies, processes, and technologies that will be required during the project were driven by the open exchange of ideas, and collaborative discussions on solutions to potential challenges.

Scientific Product Manager at ELIXIR, Dr Melissa Konopko, travelled from the UK to share her insights into the Genomic Data Infrastructure (GDI). There were many parallels to learn from this project which is enabling access to genomic and related phenotypic and clinical data across Europe through establishing a federated, sustainable and secure infrastructure to access the data. 

Explore how GUARDIANS is accelerating human genomics and related omics research in Australia through the development of world-class digital infrastructure.

Contact us if you’d like to learn more.

Creative collisions: Bio Day a hit at Supercomputing Asia 2024

This month's Supercomputing Asia (SCA) conference featured a dedicated ‘Bio Day’ which focused on the intersection of biology and computing. Life scientists were enthusiastically invited to interact with the Asia Pacific high performance computing (HPC) community at the Sydney event. The conference organisers offered special access to almost 40 researchers and research infrastructure providers who were keen to participate in the biology-focused sessions. This extra support to add the unique voice of life scientists to the HPC forum was generously provided through Bioplatforms Australia's platinum sponsorship of the event.

Bio Day commenced with Prof Alex Brown, Director - National Centre for Indigenous Genomics, delivering a keynote presentation ‘Towards a National Indigenous genomics Ecosystem within Australia.’ As Professor of Indigenous Genomics at the Telethon Kids Institute and The Australian National University, Alex is an internationally leading Aboriginal clinician/researcher who has worked his entire career in Aboriginal health in the provision of public health services, infectious diseases and chronic disease care, health care policy and research.

Later, sessions titled ‘Building the Foundation: Genomic Data Infrastructure for Precision Medicine and Beyond’ showcased several key pieces of research infrastructure that Australian BioCommons has developed to support life scientists including:

• The Australian BioCommons Leadership Share (ABLeS)

• The Australian Alphafold Service

• The newly funded GUARDIANS project

• A pilot program bringing Seqera Platform to Australian researchers

Some of BioCommons’ significant national partners such as the Australian Amphibian and Reptile Genomics Initiative (AusARG) and international collaborators ELIXIR were also showcased on Bio Day. Additionally, Dr Kate Michie’s (UNSW) talk revealed the ‘Transformative Impact of Deep Learning on Accelerating Molecular Research: A Focus on AlphaFold2 and its Implementation Challenges.’ The Skills and Training Track on the same day also featured our training guru, Dr Melissa Burke, presenting our unique Training Cooperative model.

Sessions held on Bio Day illuminated the unique challenges that bioinformatics research brings to HPC, including:

• Episodic and extended access is required for compute resources

• Compute use is reliant on experimental outcomes, and difficult to predict in advance

• Software is diverse, rapidly evolving, and in many cases not optimised for HPC

• Researchers may have limited experience working in HPC environments

The light shone on these unique challenges stimulated some uncommon conversations at SCA, which aim to improve life science researchers' access to appropriate and scalable bioinformatics methods and compute resources. Dr Johan Gustafsson, Bioinformatics Engagement Officer at BioCommons said:

The conference was a unique opportunity to bring two worlds together - researchers working hard in their particular field of biology don’t normally attend HPC conferences, and vice versa. So it was great to see them starting to speak the same language!

Uwe Winter, BioCloud DevOps Engineer at BioCommons attended a workshop on the recently launched Trillion Parameter Consortium (TPC), a group formed to address the challenges of building large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) systems and advancing trustworthy and reliable AI for scientific research.

Discussions at the TPC workshop brought up a lot of exciting ideas on utilising AI in a fully automated research environment. I was inspired to hear TPC’s future plans and can’t wait to apply them to BioCommons infrastructure for the benefit of Australian researchers!

Overall, Bio Day at SCA was a fantastic chance to continue important conversations around the specialised support and infrastructure that life scientists need. BioCommons extends our thanks to Bioplatforms Australia for their sponsorship and to the conference organisers for running a successful event.