BioCommons supports the creation of specialist training with Genomics for Australian Plants
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.
Read More
BioCommons bioinformatics training program making great progress
BioCommons recently published our unique hybrid method in PLoS Computational Biology. Application of a bioinformatics training delivery method for reaching dispersed and distant trainees is a practical 'how-to' description of the method we developed over the years to make our hands-on training easily accessible to a national audience.
All of our training activities are made possible by the participation of a raft of enthusiastic volunteers from around Australia and beyond, as seen on our trainers page.
The enthusiasm that we and our partners have for sharing training resources and opportunities has inspired us to form the Bioinformatics Training Cooperative. We've now begun offering collaborative workshops.
Read More
Better plant quarantine enabled by Galaxy Australia’s two millionth job
To celebrate the broad update and diversity of their users, Galaxy Australia took the opportunity to spotlight the researcher who submitted the two millionth job to the service.
Dr Ruvini Lelwala is a Bioinformatics Research Associate at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) working with the guidance of A/Prof Roberto Barrero, eResearch Office (QUT). As part of a multidisciplinary group of bioinformaticians, computational biologists, molecular biologists, plant pathologists and policy makers, Ruvini is using Galaxy Australia to develop enhanced diagnostics for the detection of exotic plant pathogens.
Read More
Find the tools, workflows and compute you need
Australian BioCommons has worked with their infrastructure partners to pull together a convenient list of the tools, workflows and compute systems that are available to Australian life science researchers. The new searchable pages offer a landscape view of what’s out there, providing a quick scan of available high performance computing resources, local installations of bioinformatics tools and useful details about relevant workflows.
Read More
Record setting global Galaxy training event
The largest-ever Galaxy training event, “GTN Smörgåsbord: a global Galaxy course” was run last month. It attracted 1189 registrations from 76 different countries, and engaged 583 live on Slack (chat platform). The mammoth asynchronous event offered all training materials - pre-recorded videos, slides, hands-on manuals, and the compute to run tutorials - and live help at any time participants joined. Read on for more details about the event and how Galaxy Australia and BioCommons staff helped make it all happen.
Read More
New Human Genome Informatics Lead
Australian BioCommons recently welcomed A/ Prof Bernie Pope to the role of Associate Director: Human Genome Informatics. Bernie is a Victorian Health and Medical Research Fellow, based at Melbourne Bioinformatics, The University of Melbourne.
Bernie's arrival marks an exciting new era for BioCommons, with the launch of two new Human Genome Informatics projects that bring together a prestigious group of partners who will work together to improve the sharing of human genomics data for research in Australia.
Read More
Building better genome browsers
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”.
Read More
Chan Zuckerberg Initiative injects funds into Galaxy platform for biomedical research
The global Galaxy Project has been awarded a US$190,000 grant by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) to extend Galaxy—a web-based computational platform—so that it can analyse large biomedical datasets and integrate with other analysis tools.
The grant will be used to
extend Galaxy to allow easy browsing and importing of datasets from large data repositories
enable Galaxy to efficiently use cloud computing resources for large-scale, near-data computing
extend Galaxy integration with other data science environments.
Read More
New investment to improve human genomics data sharing for research in Australia
A new investment from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC), Australian BioCommons and multiple partner organisations will transform how human genomics data for research is shared by bringing the best global technologies and standards to Australia. Through this new project, genomic data from thousands of Australians will be able to be shared securely and responsibly on national and global scales, enabling comparison with very large numbers of other genomes to ensure their full research value can be realised.
Read More
CloudStor integration for Galaxy Australia is now live
Life sciences researchers using the Galaxy Australia analysis platform can now easily and securely move their data to and from the AARNet CloudStor research data storage platform.
This new integration is helping to streamline workflows for Australian researchers collaborating nationally and internationally on projects across the sciences and humanities that aim to solve some of the biggest problems facing our planet.
Read More
