Australian Pest Genome Partnership (APGP)

The Challenge

Australian researchers and pest species managers are developing chemical, biological and genetic control strategies for native and invasive pest species. However, they often lack quality reference datasets such as genomes of relevance to Australia, associated population data and pipelines for downstream use and analysis of data assets.

The Response

The Australian Pest Genome Partnership (APGP) is delivering reference-quality data assets for Australian pests and invasive species to aid development and uptake of modern genome-based approaches to their management.

This project has:

• identified and collated national and international pest and invasive species data with metadata
• delivered workflows and software pipelines with connectivity to interactive analytical tools
• made collated and curated reference genomics data assets available via the CSIRO Data Access Portal.

Who Will Benefit

Australians will benefit from reduced public health risks and the reduction in the impacts of these species. The APGP will also enable:

• public health managers to design intervention strategies and control options for human and animal disease
• research use on a global scale and permit rapid reanalysis when conditions change or when research identifies a new trait of concern
• student, researcher and citizen science training using existing software linked to generated data assets.

The Partners

• CSIRO
• ANU
• Macquarie University
• University of Melbourne
• Australian BioCommons
• Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries
• South Australian Research and Development Institute

Further Resources

• Read the final project report.
• Read press releases on the APGP from CSIRO and the Grains Research and Development Corporation (GRDC).
• To learn more about the APGP, visit the CSIRO AGI website.