New director seeks broader role for AGRF

Dr Sue Forrest, the new head of the Australian Genome Research Facility, is keen to raise the facility's profile as a natural home for agricultural genomics as well as biomedical, she said today.

Forrest's appointment as director, replacing Prof John Mattick, marks a new phase for the national research facility in providing access to genomic technologies to the research community.

AGRF chairman Prof John Shine said that Forrest would provide excellent leadership and management to the facility, which has nodes at Melbourne's Walter and Eliza Hall Institute and the University of Queensland, as well as a newly established agricultural genomics node associated with the Plant Functional Genomics Centre at the University of Adelaide.

"Sue has an appreciation of the issues facing local research groups and also the international trends and directions to drive AGRF into the future," Shine said.

Forrest, who previously held the position of scientific director at the AGRF, said that one of her key strategies would be to facilitate a closer relationship between the AGRF and the scientific community, a link she sees as vital to the function of the facility.

"There is still a large gap in the knowledge of how to utilise genomic technology," she said. "We need to be working with the scientists, and not just selling the service."

Among Forrest's ideas is a plan to work more closely with other major national research facilities, such as the Australian Phenomics Facility located at the Australian National University, to provide researchers with a more complete, global picture of genomics.

"We'll certainly be focusing on our sector partnerships and in the short-term developing our new offering in SNP and agricultural services," she said. "We have the ability to assist research groups right through from project design to analysis of results by integrating the latest technology and scientific expertise."

The AGRF would probably expand by around 25 per cent, in part to support its increased activities and maximise its liaisons with the research community, Forrest said. But new nodes were unlikely at this point, as the facility does not want to duplicate existing genomics facilities around the country.

Instead, Forrest said she hoped that states would encourage researchers to use the AGRF by providing grants to cover the cost of the research.

"We're raising the profile of the organisation around the country as a place where genomic research should be performed. We're not aiming to just be for medical research," she said.

One of the opportunities Forrest is keen to promote is the development of genomics for agriculture. The new node at the Plant Functional Genomics Centre is a natural position for the AGRF, she said.

"We're working out where their research needs more high-throughput analysis," she said.