Establishing an Australian Reference Genome Atlas and Leadership Application in Bushfire Data

The Challenge

Genomic data of some species is publicly available but stored in a multitude of largely disconnected online databases, and only parts are known to people. Data for many species is being actively generated, and a significant amount is stored in herbaria, museums and other organisational repositories that have limited discoverability. 

To realise the vision where genomic breeding approaches are applied widely across agriculture and conservation, data from as many Australian-relevant species as possible needs to be findable and combinable for subsequent analyses.

The Approach

The overall goal of the project was to establish the critical infrastructure to make genomics data available and discoverable. For genomic approaches to be applied widely across agriculture and biodiversity in Australia, this infrastructure needs to: 

• locate and aggregate descriptions of all relevant genomic data in one place
• enable searching across these data based on a variety of contextual aspects around the organism, functional classification, geographical location and altitude
• enable comparative analysis of genomic data from organisms that have been selected based on the taxonomic or functional classifications. 

To this end, the project has established the Australian Reference Genome Atlas (ARGA) platform.

The Partners

• Atlas of Living Australia (ALA)
• BioPlatforms Australia
• Australian BioCommons

Further Resources

• View a presentation by Kathryn Hall (DC011) about ARGA at the November 2023 Bushfire Data Challenges Forum.
• Read the ARGA Project Community Engagement Report.
• Access all code produced by ARGA on GitHub.