Australian Reference Genome Atlas Launch

About the Event

The Australian Reference Genome Atlas (ARGA) is a new service empowering Australia’s researchers to discover, select and access genomics data and resources to answer biological questions in conservation, biosecurity, agriculture, biodiversity, evolution, biopharmaceuticals and other natural products, environmental resilience and more.

ARGA realises true interoperability, bringing together genomic and genetic data from several international and domestic data repositories, and intersecting these data with authoritative taxonomy, specimen browsing and curated ecological and phenotypic traits sets. While it was designed to enable richer data discovery for Australia’s biosciences scientists, researchers and policy-makers, ARGA will become everyone’s starting point to learn more about genomic data for species relevant to Australia.  

The ARGA Project commenced in April 2022 as a National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) partnership between the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) and the Australian BioCommons, supported by Bioplatforms Australia. Additional support for the project was received from the ARDC Bushfires Data Challenges Program. The inter-organisational project team has worked hard to create this innovative web application and they are thrilled to now share the results with you.

The evolution of the ARGA project and insights into how the ARGA index meets the evolving needs of the research and policy communities will be discussed at the online launch. You will learn how ARGA fits within the data ecosystems for biodiversity and genomics data in Australia and see an outline of the future roadmap for the application. There will be a demonstration of ARGA and time for questions – and of course species searches!

Join us if you are interested in using genomic data for species relevant to Australia. This online launch event is free to join, but you must register for a place in advance.

Speakers

• Ms Sarah Richmond, General Manager, Science Program, BioPlatforms Australia
• Dr Andre Zerger, Director, Atlas of Living Australia, CSIRO 
• Dr Kathryn Hall, Product Champion, ARGA Project, Atlas of Living Australia, CSIRO