The Australian Apollo Service – establishing a national service – the process that got us there
Dr Tiff Nelson1, Dr Jeff Christiansen1, Dr Justin Lee2, Dr Gareth Price2, Mr Nick Rhodes2, Ms Madeline Bassetti2, Mr Alejandro Bulgaris2, Mr Mike W C Thang2, Dr Cameron Hyde2, Mr Mark Gray3, Dr Melissa Burke1, Dr Christina Hall1, Mr Brian Davis1, Dr Steven Manos1, Associate Professor Andrew Lonie1, Dr Nigel Ward1, Dr Dominique Gorse2
1Australian Biocommons, Carlton, Australia
2Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF), Saint Lucia, Australia
3Pawsey Supercomputing Centre, Kensington, Australia
Background
The development and operation of relevant infrastructure, platforms and services for bioinformatics is a key ambition for the Australian BioCommons. How do we achieve the goal of developing resourced and relevant Services for the Australian Life Science research community that will be endorsed and used?
Method
Strong engagement with end-user and infrastructure operator communities is paramount to understand science needs, helping direct the deployment and resourcing of appropriate infrastructure to maximise impact.
Results
Through the BioCommons Community Engagement program, researchers undertaking Genome Annotation identified the software Apollo as a critical solution to allow for collaborative manual curation of genome annotations, but with considerable systems administration effort to set up and manage. The Apollo software requires a significant technology (full stack) install, regular updates, maintenance and long-term data storage. We are a collaboration of infrastructure partners and bioinformatics experts that have developed a fully hosted Australian Apollo Service. This has involved the identification and implementation of a scalable deployment model, computational resources, website development, creation of Terms of Use, processes for onboarding and creation of training and support resources.
Conclusion
We have built the Australian Apollo Service located at https://apollo-portal.genome.edu.au/ that allows Australian-based researcher teams to access their own fully-subsidised Apollo Instances to collaboratively curate their genome annotations with research partners. The Service was soft-launched in July 2021 with 10 research groups and launched publicly in late September 2021 with a growing number of onboarded users.
Biography:
Tiff Nelson is the Community Engagement Officer with the Australian BioCommons. Tiff has a background in genomics and microbiology and her role with the BioCommons is to engage the research community about their bioinformatic challenges and identify and deploy solutions to make research easier.