Biotechnology sector

Biotechnology is a strategic area for South Australia, which hosts many world-class bioscience research groups in medical, agricultural and environmental bioscience with a wide range of applications including diagnosis and treatment of disease, wine chemistry, plant and livestock breeding, aquaculture, pest management, and water quality.

One of the crucial requirements for biotechnology is access to leading-edge bioinformatics capability enabling storage, querying and processing of biological data sets. This includes support for computationally intensive tasks such as searching and analysis of gene and protein data, protein modelling studies, drug design, and molecular dynamics simulations.

Biological data is increasing rapidly in size and complexity, which is driving the uptake of advanced high performance computing and grid computing technologies in bioscience. The Department of Plant Science at the Waite Institute and the recently established Australian Centre for Plant Functional Genomics study the physiology, molecular biology and genetic makeup of plants, with particular focus on the improvement of commercially important food crops such as wheat and barley.

The Centre has made signficiant contributions to support eResearch SA's high performance computing facilities, which are used for a variety of applications including gene and protein sequence analysis.

Bioinformatics

In the field of bioinformatics, the combination of computer science, information technology and the life sciences has been producing extraordinary results. Complex biological systems have begun to yield their secrets to the superior analytical and processing power of eResearch methods and technologies.

At eResearch SA, we’re working with bioinformatics researchers to develop new approaches for analysing patterns of ‘repeats’ in genetic code. Our bioinformatics specialists work closely with academic researchers to discover patterns in repeated code, annotate them, and classify them into groups.

We’re working with local scientists to scrutinise the bovine and equine genomes (among others) and learn more about which patterns occur together and which don’t. From this process, researchers are uncovering previously unknown repeat patterns in a variety of genomes.

The meaning and implications of repeated fragments has long been a subject of debate for genetic researchers. Strings of ‘repeated’ DNA comprise the bulk of the human genome but we know very little about what they do and how the segments relate to each other.

Understanding how and why these repeats function might one day help uncover some of the mysteries of evolution, explain different traits in populations of the same species, or reveal the workings of ‘repeat disorders’ in humans, such as Huntington’s Disease and Fragile X Syndrome.