Research into how organisms work and interact – systems biology – is indispensable for developing new drugs, producing b
etter and more resilient crops and increasing our understanding of the environment.
The $40 million the Government is committing through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to systems biology infrastructure will greatly increase the ability of our researchers to study the observable characteristics of plants and animals – their phenotypes – and how these relate to their genetic make-up.
Funding is going to develop a national plant phenomics facility, which will aid in the development of cutting-edge crops by measuring the attributes of plants and relating them to their genetic make-up.
Mice have become indispensable in research into human biological systems because of their genetic similarities to humans. NCRIS funding is establishing an Australian Phenomics Network to increase the number of mouse models of human disease available to Australian researchers and so reduce the cost of accessing them.
An online Atlas of Living Australia is being established to provide ready access to the data worth $1 billion held in biological collections across the country.
Plant science and agriculture are both vitally important for Australia. This facility will strengthen our world-class plant science and accelerate the research community’s ability to transfer its scientific discoveries to applied agricultural outputs.
Genomics has provided science with powerful tools to probe the molecular make-up of plants. But measuring the effects of these manipulations – that is the effect of each gene on each function within the plant - is currently limiting our ability to move forward. Phenotyping is our bottleneck. This investment in a National Plant Phenomics Facility, bringing robotics, image analysis and a computer-controlled environment together, provides the opportunity to relieve this bottleneck and move research forward for all Australian plant scientists.
Professor Mark Tester, School of Agriculture, Food and Wine, the University of Adelaide
The Australian Phenomics Network will provide a world-class network of mouse production, cryopreservation, phenotyping, documentation, distribution and databasing facilities that will remove current barriers, such as cost and accessibility, to making sophisticated mouse models of human and animal disease available for medical and other research groups in Australia.
The Network will be led by Monash University and the Australian National University, in partnership with Victoria’s Walter & Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research, the Queensland Institute of Medical Research, the Menzies Research Institute and the Animal Resources Centre in Western Australia.
The National Plant Phenomics Facility will be established as a two-node facility with one node in South Australia, hosted by The University of Adelaide (UA) and the second node in ACT at the CSIRO Plant Industry and the Australian National University (ANU).
The two nodes will provide state-of-the-art capabilities for plant phenotyping (offering controlled environments, field-based plant growth monitoring using high-throughput robotics, automated imaging and computing technologies) integrated with the ongoing adaptation and application of emerging phenomics measurement technologies. This will enable researchers to measure the attributes of plants and relate these to their genetic make-up.
The facilities will be unmatched anywhere else in the world. Consequently they are likely to attract researchers from other countries, encouraging collaboration with Australian talent.
Led by the CSIRO, the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) will be a unique informatics platform that underpins the Integrated Biological Systems capability. The ALA will be an authoritative, freely accessible, distributed and federated biodiversity data management system that links Australia’s biological knowledge with its scientific reference collections and other custodians of biological information.
A key principle of NCRIS is that the facilities funded by the programme should be accessible to researchers on the basis of merit at reasonable prices, wherever they are located in Australia.
For enquiries about the Australian Phenomics Network, please contact:
Dr Steve Winslade
Chief Executive Officer
Australian Phenomics Facility
Australian National University
Building 117 Garran Road
CANBERRA ACT 0200
Australia
Tel: +61 2 6125 4810
Mobile: +61 408 246 816
Email: steve.winslade@anu.edu.au
For enquiries about the National Plant Phenomics Facility, please contact:
Professor Mark Tester
Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics
University of Adelaide, Waite Campus
GLEN OSMOND SA 5064
Australia
Tel: +61 8 8303 7159
Email: mark.tester@acpfg.com.au
For enquiries about the Atlas of Living Australia, please contact:
Dr Donald Hobern
Director, Atlas of Living Australia
CSIRO Entomology - Black Mountain
GPO Box 1700
CANBERRA ACT 2601
Australia
Tel: +61 2 6246 4262
Email: Donald.Hobern@csiro.au
For matters related to management of the NCRIS programme, please contact the NCRIS Team by email at ncris@dest.gov.au or by telephone on 02 6229 4223.
For further information, please see the homepage of the Australian Phenomics Network at http://www.apf.edu.au/
The homepages of the National Plant Phenomics Facility and the Atlas of Living Australia were not yet live at 20 December 2007.