Poster Presentation 47th Lorne Genome Conference 2026

Genomics Infrastructure to Support Australian Researchers (#263)

Tiff Nelson 1
  1. Australian BioCommons, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Genomics is increasingly employed across research and industry. However, keeping pace with the management, analysis and publication of genomic data is a global challenge. Since 2020, Australian BioCommons has developed community-scale digital capacity, training and bioinformatics infrastructure to support Australia’s life scientists. By engaging with the national community of practitioners, we have distilled their roadblocks and needs, and created Infrastructure Roadmaps that describe a blueprint to resolve these challenges. As a result, we have established a number of computational systems and services, including: 

  • The Australian Reference Genome Atlas (ARGA, arga.org.au/), a data discovery platform that indexes genomic data from Australian-relevant species;
  • The Galaxy Australia Genome Lab (usegalaxy.org.au/), a user-friendly web-based, data analysis platform with access to pre-installed tools, workflows and training;
  • The Australian Apollo Service, (apollo-portal.genome.edu.au/), a fully supported manual curation, visualisation and collaborative genome annotation service; and
  • Support for command-line users with access to computational resources via ABLeS (Australian BioCommons Leadership Share, org.au/ables), fully-tested workflows on the BioCommons WorkflowHub space (workflowhub.eu/programmes/8) and access to the Nextflow Seqera Service to run and monitor pipelines (biocommons.org.au/seqera-platform).

All BioCommons services cater to a variety of expertise levels with dedicated user support, are delivered collaboratively through partnerships with infrastructure and informatics providers, and are fully subsidised for Australian-based researchers.