Industry and Bioinformatics - Perspectives from agriculture and healthcare - ABACBS 2023

Disclaimer:

This is a personal reflection on the conference, the views expressed here are personal and do not represent the views of my employer or any other organisations I am affiliated with.
I would like to acknowledge the Turrbal and Jagera peoples, Traditional Custodians of the land on which we gathered, and pay my respect to the their Elders past, present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

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Synopsis:
The ABACBS national annual conference is a popular gathering for bioinformaticians to communicate advances and discuss trendy topics. Since the inaugural event in 2015. It has since visited a few major Australian cities including Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart, this year ABACBS 2023 conference gathered again in the picturesque sunshine coastal city of Brisbane. ABACBS2023 featured a variety of plenary sessions, contributed talks and poster presentations from both international and national contributors supported by ample workshops on speciality topics. This year, the conference covered a range of topics from genomics-inspired conservation efforts to greenhouse gas reduction cattle breading, but AI certainly once again took centre stage and abundant bioinformatics applications with AI in mind were discussed in depth.

ABACBS2023

Australia has a vibrant bioinformatics presence that intersects with many fields including but not limited to healthcare, pharmaceuticals, agriculture and conservations. The Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society Inc (ABACBS) is the peak body and national scientific and professional society for bioinformatics and computational biology in Australia. Since the inaugural 2015 meeting in Sydney, the ABACBS annual conference has been a platform for Bioinformaticians around Australasia and beyond to be gathered under one roof to have an opportunity at the close of each year to discuss the trendy topics in the ever-changing scientific landscape and scope up the strategic plans for the new year. ABACBS2023 was the first time in ABACBS history to be held in collaboration with the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB).

Omics in Agriculture and Conservation efforts

In the last decades or so, climate change has developed into a lot more than just scientific debates and we have started to accumulate real-life experiences from extreme weather to widespread biological catastrophic events. All those finally start to have a bigger impact on politics and businesses and consequently, we start to see a stream of ESG transition and some real efforts in enterprise-scale greenhouse gas reduction. Genomics science is playing a positive role in many of those initiatives.

One of the conservation efforts to support marine life diversity is underway by investigating the survival factors that may potentially be used to help the survival of coral reefs under extreme weather conditions. The initiative identified a group of Kimbley coral species from the Kimberley region that have thrived under harsh weather conditions. The group identified a set of populational structural variants that are unique to the population through Illumina sequencing and hopes through further meta-transcriptomics projects to better understand its functional contributions to various weather conditions.

Genomics sequencing not only found renovative applications in conservation efforts, cattle industry also demonstrated new applications in combating climate change. Cattle industry is no doubt a major methane emitter and Australia is no doubt one key stakeholders in this conversation. Genomics sequencing is one of the revolutionary tools in selecting genetically fit cabs to deliver a greenhouse gas reduction solution at the industry scale. The emerging generation of long-read sequencing has started to show promising application over Illumina not only due to the additional ability to provide taxonomy information for more accurate selection but also to offer an appealing cost reduction at scale which the last generation SNP array was not able to achieve. With the ever-increasing demand for a more environmentally friendly industry, the third-generation long-read technology may hold the key to a sustainable solution of the future cattle industry in Australia and beyond.

Leverage Generative AI in Bioinformatics context

Data Governance and Ethics

To be continued …