Australian genomics comes in from the cold

Australia's on-the-fence approach to large-scale sequencing and genomics projects has left it until recently on the fringes of the field, according to a leading US-based genomics researcher.

"Australia's position was pretty much out in the cold until the wallaby project. There was not a contribution in terms of data production. It's not a shameful thing, but a potentially missed opportunity," says expatriate Aussie genomics researcher Richard Gibbs, who runs one of five US NIH-funded human genome sequencing centres at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. His centre has played a crucial role in the sequencing of quite a few genomes including the human genome, rat, and bovine sequences,

"There is this notion that you can still be part of the program even if you are not contributing some of the fundamental data, and that is in fact true, but not easily true. This kind of wait and see thing has really been a bit of an obstacle."

Gibbs said that the development of areas such as bioinformatics in Australia might have been driven more strongly by more participation in genomics. And he noted that these projects tend to foster international interaction and collaborations, in addition to spurring research efforts in related areas.

He pointed to the internationally-supported bovine genome project, which received some of its funding from Australia's CSIRO, and which is now being paid back in the form of information on genes that are of interest to agricultural scientists across the country, as well as across the world.

Gibbs has been in Australia to visit with colleagues at the AGRF on the wallaby genome sequencing project and to lend support to other burgeoning genomics efforts in Australia, such as the cotton bollworm moth genome project.

Last year Gibbs was delighted to find that his group had been chosen to partner the Australian team on the wallaby genome sequencing project, which is being jointly funded by the NIH, the Victorian State Government, Applied BioSystems and the Jack Brockhoff Foundation.

"I'm disappointed that we weren't working on the platypus as well, although since all the data is freely available, it's kind of a psychological thing," he says.

Gibbs said the benefits of the collaboration went both ways as he had a nice rationale for visiting Australia and working closely with researchers here, while researchers from Australia would have opportunities to visit the sequencing centre at Baylor.

"It's interesting times here," he says. "I'm here to support the local genomics effort, and really just to keep my finger on the pulse of what's happening here -- Melbourne is a really vibrant bioscience community."

According to Gibbs, the wallaby project is likely to benefit from recent human X chromosome research -- X chromosomes have been a focus of research in wallabies for some time.

"It just got a huge boost I think, because of this focus and interest in X chromosome regulation, and defining subtle human phenotypes. I think if you go to the biologists who have worked on the marsupial model for so long they'll say 'well yeah, that's why we've been doing it, or one of the reasons' and it's been clear to them all along that this is so important," he says.

"There are going to be more interested eyes looking back on the marsupial work. That's a big boost for the project."

He believes that Australia could play an important role in sequencing organisms of interest to both Australian researchers and industry here and abroad, such as agricultural pest cotton bollworm moth genome, the eucalyptus genome and the canola genome.

"There'll be a lot of international interest [in these projects]," Gibbs says.

"Who ever met a genome that wasn't informative? We have such a tiny amount of genomic information -- the notion that we're saturated is just ridiculous. There's just a tremendous amount to be learned from each piece of genomic data."

He said that genomic information was not just some exotic add-on; it was a basic foundation that allowed researchers to focus on hypothesis-driven questions of interest rather than just discovery of genes.