Australian BioCommons BYOD Expansion

The Challenge

Life sciences has become a data-intensive discipline involving the generation and combination of large complex datasets from personal, institutional, national and international repositories. 

This project is building a platform where researchers can bring data they want to combine and analyse it effectively. Hence the name ‘bring your own data’ (BYOD).

The Response

The Australian BioCommons is new life sciences research infrastructure for enhancing the productivity, capability and capacity of Australian research biologists and research informaticians. 

The Australian BioCommons BYOD expansion project is augmenting that capability with a suite of software and workflow development and deployment activities that enables highly accessible, highly available, highly scalable analysis and data sharing capabilities for the benefit of life science researchers nationally.

The project comprises three main activities:

• Delivering highly accessible Graphical User Interface (GUI) online services that give life sciences researchers access to a well-structured, world’s best-practice bioinformatics workbenches for research and training. As well as improving and expanding the existing Galaxy Australia service, this activity will also deploy new GUI services in response to community needs.
• Developing a complementary Command Line Interface (CLI)-focussed BYOD platform, providing for community creation, access and exchange of workflows, tools, training and user support across national and institutional compute infrastructure. The command-line bioinformatics tools and workflows will be made available at key partner infrastructures, and will be built to be easily deployed on other infrastructures.
• Creating data infrastructure to connect -omics instruments (initially housed in Bioplatforms Australia sponsored instrument facilities supporting genomics, proteomics and metabolomics) and reference datasets to the analysis infrastructure, underpinned by national and international data transport.

Who Will Benefit

The Australian BioCommons BYOD Platform will enhance the productivity, capability and capacity of Australian research biologists and research informaticians by providing a new ability to apply and improve a growing array of digitally enabled bioinformatics research techniques. 

It will help our Australian researchers stay at the forefront of a wave of international investment and developments in these new technologies.

The Partners

The Australian BioCommons BYOD Platform is an outcome of considerable consultation with the research community. The concept has been extensively developed and refined with the community to bring the all stakeholders together and further strengthen the project.

Our partners are:

• The Australian BioCommons
• The University of Melbourne
• Bioplatforms Australia (BPA)
• AARNet
• Australian Access Federation 
• National Computational Infrastructure 
• Pawsey Supercomputing Centre
• Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation 
• Melbourne Bioinformatics
• Sydney Informatics Hub
• Australian Genome Research Facility.

Target Outcomes

The extended Australian BioCommons BYOD capabilities will include:

• integration of the Bioplatforms Australia-funded instrument base for genomics, proteomics and metabolomics
• enhanced accessibility to reference data prioritised by Australian research communities
• managed access to datastores and compute infrastructures to meet analysis demand
• adoption of best-practice features and functionalities realised within the international Galaxy project.