Poster Presentation Australian Microbial Ecology Conference 2024

Building User-friendly, Web-based Research Infrastructure for Microbiome Data Analysis (#10)

Tiffanie M Nelson 1 , Jeff H Christiansen 1 , Ziad Al Bkhetan 1 , Catherine Bromhead 1 , Patrick K Capon 1 , Johan R Gustafsson 1 , Dominique (Dom) Gorse 2 , Mark Gray 3 , Christina Hall 1 , Cameron Hyde 2 , Justin Lee 2 , Steven Manos 1 , Gareth Price 2 , Michael W. C. Thang 2 , Nigel Ward 1 , Andrew Lonie 1
  1. Australian BioCommons, North Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
  2. Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF), St Lucia, Queensland, Australia
  3. Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, Kensington, Western Australia, Australia

Omics informed Microbiome Analysis is increasingly employed across research and industry, and keeping pace with the management, analysis and publication of microbiome data is proving to be a global challenge. Since 2019, Australian BioCommons has developed community-scale digital capacity, training and bioinformatics infrastructure to support Australian life scientists. By engaging with the national community of practitioners, we have distilled their roadblocks and needs into a Microbiome Analysis Infrastructure Roadmap for Australia, which describes a blueprint to resolve these challenges. As a result, Australian BioCommons is now facilitating the development of: 

  • Galaxy Australia Microbiome Lab, a user-friendly web browser-based data analysis platform with access to pre-installed microbiome analysis tools, workflows and training
  • Fully-tested OTU and MAG related workflows sourced from global initiatives, which are made available for use on Microbiome Lab with How-to-Guides explaining how to use them
  • An Australian Nextflow Seqera Service to launch, manage and monitor the execution of Nextflow-based microbiome analysis workflows on various supported infrastructures. It allows easy utilisation of nf-core workflows such as https://github.com/nf-core/ampliseq.

We are seeking feedback and input from the researcher community about our proposed activities. All BioCommons services cater to a variety of expertise levels with dedicated user support, are delivered collaboratively through partnerships with infrastructure and informatics providers, and are fully subsidised for Australian-based researchers.