The Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) has seeded the establishment of cross-NCRIS national data assets to support science across disciplines. The successful projects will bring together complementary types of data at a scale that provides new insights and efficiencies, leading to novel research applications and driving discovery and innovation in addressing global challenges.
Bioplatforms Australia is a key partner on four of these data asset projects:
OzBarley – from genome to phenome and back
Led by the Australian Plant Phenomics Facility (APPF), OzBarley will bring together complementary but disparate datasets to create an enhanced asset for the assessment of crop genomes, and the corresponding variability in trait expression with relation to the environment. Together, this will allow researchers, breeders, bioinformaticians and machine learning experts to work together and push the limits of current research approaches in crop management.
Microbial Ocean Atlas: coupling genomic and oceanographic data to enhance integration
Led by IMOS, the Microbial Ocean Atlas project will drive the integration of large DNA sequencing datasets that describe the composition and function of Australian marine microbial assemblages, with oceanographic datasets (e.g. water temperature, salinity, nutrients, dissolved oxygen, current direction) that describe the form and dynamics of Australian ocean ecosystems. The resulting data asset will accelerate our understanding of how changing environmental conditions drive the microbial processes that sustain the planet, while enabling non-microbial researchers’ direct access to key microbial insights that will enhance modelling of ecological and biogeochemical processes.
Biomedical Discovery Asset – Integrating clinical and experimental genotype-phenotype data for biomedical discovery and disease management
Led by Phenomics Australia, the Biomedical Discovery Asset project will establish a new framework for linking two of Australia’s most important biological/biomedical datasets, in a highly curated, user-friendly and accessible environment. Connecting a human clinical dataset, ASPREE-G, with an experimental mouse dataset, Missense Mutation Library, will provide a deeper functional understanding of the genomic determinants of human health and disease. The resulting combined asset will enable clinicians and biomedical researchers to collaborate more efficiently and effectively and improve diagnostic decision making, targeted therapeutic development, and the design of new disease prevention strategies.
A National Scale Data Asset to Integrate Molecular Imaging with Bio-analytics
Led by EMBL Australia and alongside Microscopy Australia, this project will develop a new resource to organise and navigate multidimensional data and drive connectivity between molecular imaging and proteomic datasets. Specifically, it will enable a new, publicly accessible national scale data asset to underpin the integration of molecular imaging with bio-analytics to drive new discoveries across a diversity of life sciences, including in drug discovery, drug target validation, structural biology, agribusiness and diagnostics.
These projects received investment from the Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) which is funded by NCRIS (The National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy).
ARDC Investment DOIs for each project are listed below:
OzBarley – https://doi.org/10.47486/XN001
Microbial Ocean Atlas – https://doi.org/10.47486/XN004
Biomedical Discovery Asset – https://doi.org/10.47486/XN003
Integrated Microscopy and Proteomic project – https://doi.org/10.47486/XN006
Read more about the ARDC Cross-NCRIS Data Assets program here.