The Australian BioCommons is supported by the Federal Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) via Bioplatforms Australia to develop community-scale digital capacity, training, and bioinformatics infrastructure to support Australia’s life scientists.
We engage broad Australian life science research communities in method focus areas, such as genome annotation and genome assembly, to understand their bioinformatic challenges and identify shared “community scale” solutions. Through this process, we have identified and deployed a number of well-resourced and freely available computational tools and systems to support genome assembly and annotation which enable researchers to focus on their research and not worry about IT issues. We also produce accompanying user documentation and training opportunities.
Resources available now to support genome assembly include Galaxy Australia (usegalaxy.org.au) which includes over 30 genome assembly tools and is resourced to achieve a eukaryotic genome assembly (e.g. an avian genome (PacBio HiFI data) with hifiasm) in less than 2 hours. Resources available to support genome annotation include Galaxy Australia (which also includes over 60 tools for automated genome annotation), as well as fully subsidised access for Australian researchers to the proprietary pipeline Fgenesh++ (for eukaryotic genome annotation) and the Australian Apollo Service (apollo-portal.genome.edu.au/) which provides a fully hosted option for research groups and consortia to host their genomes and annotations whilst improving annotations through collaborative curation efforts. For more information and access to the services, visit biocommons.org.au.