Bioplatforms Australia charges Australian BioCommons with addressing our national bioinformatics challenges

The Australian BioCommons is proud to announce the signing of a contract with Bioplatforms Australia to deliver enhanced coordination in the planning and development of research infrastructure supporting bioinformatics in life science research. The $20M NCRIS investment will improve the ability of many of Australia’s best researchers to undertake leading edge bioinformatics analyses. The Australian BioCommons is partnering with a network of Australian and global bioinformatics and data intensive research groups to address high priority challenges through to 2023.

This significant milestone follows the success of the Bioinformatics Commons Pathfinder Project that actively engaged with the Australian bioscience community during 2019-2020. The Pathfinder activity established the Australian BioCommons as a sound investment avenue and a national bridge between the biosciences research community and both national and institutional digital resource providers. Working with national infrastructures including Bioplatforms Australia, the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet), Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, National Computational Infrastructure, Australian Access Federation, University of Sydney through Sydney Informatics Hub, Queensland CyberInfrastructure Foundation, Melbourne Bioinformatics and a raft of eminent universities and research institutes, it delivered exemplar bioinformatics services and generated cooperative research activities with new research communities. A powerful group of highly engaged partners now stand ready to provide guidance and implementation assistance to establish a national research infrastructure for biosciences, through the Australian BioCommons, that is closely aligned with international peers and supported through a combination of national and institutional funding.

The establishment of the Australian BioCommons follows several years of strategic discussions with national and international peers. The role of EMBL Australia Bioinformatics Resource, enabled by funding partners Bioplatforms Australia and the University of Melbourne, was pivotal in establishing an Australian national bioinformatics infrastructure network. This cooperative representation to the national government successfully leveraged national research infrastructure funding has been exceptionally well received by international peers, as demonstrated by our recent Collaboration Strategy with ELIXIR since 2017, announced here.