Next Gen Sequencing Project Kicks Off with Biomatters and University of Queensland

The University of Queensland and New Zealand scientific software development company Biomatters are celebrating their success in receiving a grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC). The ARC has granted their application for funding research on the development of algorithms for bacterial metagenomics research, using the latest DNA sequencing technology from Applied Biosystems (AB) and Illumina. "It is vitally important that biologists can actually use the vast amounts of data generated from the next generation sequencers," says Candace Toner, CEO of Biomatters, "we are committed to a multi-year partnership with the University of Queensland to further develop special tools within Geneious that will give biologists the power to use next generation sequence data for significantly furthering biomedical, agricultural and environmental research – easily and efficiently."Metagenomics is a relatively new field of bioscience that combines molecular biology and genetics in an effort to identify, and characterize the genetic material from environmental samples. Microbial ecosystems occupy every possible biological niche, but little is known about their genetic structures or how microbes function in the environment. Bacteria are highly relevant to human and plant health and they affect the well-being of all living organisms."The lack of adequate visualization tools for biological research is a major impediment to progress for researchers interested in analyzing the vast data output from the new sequencing technologies now available," says David Edwards, Associate Professor at the School of Land, Crop and Food Sciences at The University of Queensland, "the Geneious software package provides an ideal framework for data management, multi-format file import and export, and it has a great user interface with visualization components that are ideal for biologists." Combining the power of genomics and bioinformatics, metagenomics is set to maximize understanding about entire biological systems. Metagenomic studies are notoriously data rich, both in the amount of data that is required to be analyzed, and in the complexity of the analysis processes. The integration of metagenomic data analysis tools within the Geneious software platform will provide a user-friendly means to analyze, interrogate and interpret next generation sequence data. Thanks to the ARC, the University of Queensland hopes to develop ground-breaking algorithms that will significantly advance research capabilities in the field of bacterial metagenomics for use by scientists around the world for many years to come.