The EMBL Australian Bioinformatics Resource (EMBL-ABR) is a distributed national research infrastructure that provides bioinformatics support to life science researchers in Australia. It has a hub-and-nodes structure with the hub hosted at the Victorian Life Science Computation Initiative at the University of Melbourne and 10 nodes located across Australian institutions. EMBL-ABR aims to increase Australia's capacity for bioinformatics research and data science, provide training in bioinformatics, and enable participation in international collaborations.

1. EMBL Australia
Bioinformatics Resource
ABACBS Conference 2016
Pip Griffin, Sonika Tyagi, Ira Cooke, Philipp E. Bayer, Dave Edwards,
Dominique Gorse, Saravanan Dayalan, Sylvain Forêt, Jac
Charlesworth, Steven Androulakis, Marc Wilkins, Rob Cook, Malcolm
McConville, Richard Edwards, Madison Flannery, Simon Gladman,
Andrew Lonie, Maria Victoria Schneider

2. EMBL Australian Bioinformatics Resource
(EMBL-ABR) is a distributed national
research infrastructure providing
bioinformatics support to life science
researchers in Australia.
About
@EMBL_ABR
www.embl-abr.org.au

3. National level bioinformatics infrastructure?

5. - fosters excellence in data
science to support
progress in biological
research and health
- bioinformatics
infrastructure
- resources
- expertise
- services
- federating world-class
researchers
- delivering training in
bioinformatics

6. - provides first-class services
to users in life sciences
research, industry and
medicine
- coordinates bioinformatics
training and education
- coordinates cooperation of
the German bioinformatics
community with
international bioinformatics
network structures

8. A rapidly evolving international context

9. EMBL Australian Bioinformatics Resource
(EMBL-ABR) is a distributed national
research infrastructure providing
bioinformatics support to life science
researchers in Australia.
About

10. 2. Contribute to the development and provision of training in data, tools and
platforms to enable Australia’s life science researchers to undertake
research in the age of big data.
3. Showcase Australian research and datasets at an international level.
4. Enable engagement in international programs that create, deploy and
develop best practice approaches to data management, software tools
and methods, computational platforms and bioinformatics services.
Mission
EMBL ABR aims to:
1. Increase Australia’s capacity to collect,
integrate, analyse, exploit, share and
archive the large heterogeneous data sets
now part of modern life science research.

11. Key Areas

12. About EMBL-ABR
• EMBL-ABR started in its current
form in March 2016
• hub – nodes network structure
• hub hosted at VLSCI, University
of Melbourne
• 10 nodes at the
institution/organisation level
across Australia

13. EMBL-ABR node Institution State
VLSCI node Victorian Life Science Computation Initiative Victoria
Monash node Monash University Victoria
MA node Metabolomics Australia Victoria
AGRF node Australian Genome Research Facility Victoria
SBI node Systems Biology Initiative New South Wales
UWA node University of Western Australia Western Australia
UTas node University of Tasmania Tasmania
JCU node James Cook University Queensland
QCIF node Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation Queensland
ANU node Australian National University Australian Capital
Territory
About EMBL-ABR

14. About EMBL-ABR
Heads of Nodes

15. About EMBL-ABR
Heads of Nodes
+
Executive

16. International Science
Advisory Group
• Paul FlicekEMBL-EBI
• Vivien BonazziNIH/BD2K
• Jason WilliamsCyVerse
• Jaap HaringaELIXIR
• Andrew YoungCSIRO
• Rebecca JohnsonAU Animals
• Delphine FleuryAU Plants
• Mark WalkerAU Microbes
• Sean GrimmondAU Medical
• Jenny MartinAU Diversity, Industry

17. Key Area Coordinators

18. EMBL-ABR is the vehicle for the Australian
Bioinformatics community to actively
participate in world’s best practice
bioinformatics, positioning our institutions at
the forefront with international partners.
EMBL-ABR Biosharing Collection: A
collection of Australian databases,
standards and policies relevant to Australia
life scientists and medical researchers
ISATools
A framework for managing metadata
in complex life science, environmental
and biomedical experiments
Data Chaperoning Service
EMBL-ABR:QCIF Node
Get advice or assistance in submitting your
data to international repositories
dc@embl-abr.org.au

19. Event Registry
Registry of
bioinformatics-related
training events
Powered by iAnn
Do your bioinformatics-
related events appear here?
If not, let us know:
contact@embl-abr.org.au
embl-abr.org.au/events

20. Do your open training materials appear here?
If not, let us know and we will add the source:
contact@embl-abr.org.au

21. ToolsAU
Catalogue of Australian
bioinformatics tools
Harvested from ELIXIR bio.tools
Do your tools appear here?
If not, add them to bio.tools or
email us:
contact@embl-abr.org.au

22. EMBL-ABR All Hands Meeting
7th December 2016
Hosted by the EMBL-ABR Hub at the University of Melbourne

23. Talk to us!
www.embl-abr.org.au
@EMBL_ABR
contact@embl-abr.org.au
Key Documents
Mailing List signup
Survey
finding
collecting
integrating
processing
analysing
storing
sharing
publishing
Philippa Griffin (a, b, c), Rudi Appels (d, e), Dieter Bulach (a), Kevin a Pope (a, c), Ute
Roessner (c), Torsten Seemann (a, c), Dan Bolser (g), Jyoti Khadake (h), Suzanna Lewis (i),
Sandra Orchard (g), Sonika Tyagi (j), Andrew Lonie (a, b, c), Maria Victoria Schneider (b, c)
Affiliations:a) EMBL-ABR: VLSCI Node, Victorian Life Science Computation
Initiative, Melbourne, Australia, (b) EMBL-ABR HUB, University of
Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia, (c) University of Melbourne, Australia, (d) AgriBio, Centre for AgriBioscience, Melbourne,
Australia, (e) Murdoch University, Perth, Australia (f) Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, (g) European
Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, United Kingdom, (h) NIHR BioResource, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom, (i)
Berkeley Bioinformatics Open-source Project, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, USA, (j) EMBL-ABR: AGRF Node,
Australian Genome Research Facility, Melbourne, Australia
Navigating the Research Data Life Cycle
For the public good
- allows others to assess reproducibility
- avoids unnecessary duplication of effort
- combining datasets can increase statistical power
- data collected using public funds should be publicly available
Why
share data?
For your own good
- access to funding
- increased citations and visibility
- good archiving helps you keep track of your own data
Good data areFindable
Accessible
Interoperable
Re-usable
Wilkinson et al. (2016) doi:10.1038/sdata.20
16.18
with a globally unique and persistent identifier
with rich metadata, registered in a searchable resource
retrievable by their identifier
with an open, free, universal retrieval protocol
using a formal, shared language
and format, and FAIR vocabularies
richly, accurately described
to domain-relevant standards
released with a data
usage license
Metadata
is the contextual information that
describes your data. It is the key
to useful and reusable data.
Metadata should be detailed,
accurate and presented using
agreed-upon vocabularies in a
standard format: for example, the
experimental metadata framework
ISATools (isa-tools.org)
As well as collating community standards,
ontologies and controlled vocabularies for
biological metadata, biosharing.org provides a
database of biological databases, searchable by
biological domain or topic and assessed as to
their connectivity and accessibility.
The OBO Foundryobofoundry.org
presents and develops open, collaborative
ontologies for biomedicine and biology
The EBIOntologyLookup Servicewww.ebi.ac.uk/ols
is a user-friendlytool for browsingbiomedical andbiologicalontologies
Data Indexessuch as datamed.org (for
biomedical data) and
www.omicsdi.org (for
multi-omics data) enable
discovery of relevant
datasets across multiple
data repositories.
Good Practicewhen Publishing
Publish detailed methods,
including code. Report persistent
identifiers for data and metadata. Tag
your shared data with the publication
identifier. Consider a full Open Science
approach, including submitting to
open-access journals.
Public DataRepositoriesThe EuropeanBioinformatics Institute (EBI),
National Centre for
Biotechnology Information (NCBI),
Swiss Institute for Bioinformatics (SIB)
and other organisations host and
curate large public data repositories
that do the work of storing and sharing
data for you. Some examples are the
European Nucleotide Archive (ENA),
UniProt, the Database of Genotypes and
Phenotypes (dbGaP) and MetaboLights.
See www.ebi.ac.uk/services and
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/guide/all for
available repositories.
Australian Data Storage
The Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of
Research states research data should generally be
retained for at least 5 years. In addition to local
institutional data storage infrastructure, the Research
Data Services project (www.rds.edu.au) is a national
network of services that securely store research data. McKiernan et al. (2016) doi:10.7554/eLife.16800
Posters 46, 55, 79