QFAB Bioinformatics is a

Queensland Queensland ( , commonly abbreviated as Qld) is a States and territories of Australia, state in northeastern Australia, and is the second-largest and third-most populous state in Australia. It is bordered by the Northern Territory, South Austr ...

-based organisation concerned with the provision of resources in

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data sets are large and complex. Bioinformatics uses biology, ...

biostatistics Biostatistics (also known as biometry) is a branch of statistics that applies statistical methods to a wide range of topics in biology. It encompasses the design of biological experiments, the collection and analysis of data from those experimen ...

and specialised

computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computer, computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and the development of both computer hardware, hardware and softw ...

platforms. QFAB operates

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country comprising mainland Australia, the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and list of islands of Australia, numerous smaller isl ...

-wide and is a key contributor to the EMBL Australia Bioinformatics Resource.

History

QFAB was established in 2007, with funding from the Queensland Government's National and International Research Alliances Program, as a joint venture between The

University of Queensland The University of Queensland is a Public university, public research university located primarily in Brisbane, the capital city of the Australian state of Queensland. Founded in 1909 by the Queensland parliament, UQ is one of the six sandstone ...

Queensland University of Technology The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is a public university, public research university located in the city of Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. It has two major campuses, a modern city campus in Gardens Point, Brisbane, Gardens Point ...

Griffith University Griffith University is a public university, public research university in South East Queensland on the Eastern states of Australia, east coast of Australia. The university was founded in 1971, but was not officially opened until 1975. Griffith ...

CSIRO The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government agency that is responsible for scientific research and its commercial and industrial applications. CSIRO works with leading organisations arou ...

’s Australian eHealth Research Centre and the

Queensland Government The Queensland Government is the state government of Queensland, Australia, a Parliament, parliamentary constitutional monarchy. Government is formed by the party or coalition that has gained a majority in the Queensland Legislative Assembly, ...

’s Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. Mark Ragan from the Institute of Molecular Bioscience (IMB) and Anthony Maeder from the Australian eHealth Research Centre led QFAB's establishment and appointed Jeremy Barker as CEO (2007–2014) to address three critical issues then facing bioinformatics in

: # integrated data and high-performance computing in a secure environment # affordable network bandwidth # access to expert personnel In 2015, Dominique Gorse became CEO of QFAB and led the strategic alliance with QCIF, the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation; the two organisations merged in April 2016. QCIF operates significant

high-performance computing High-performance computing (HPC) is the use of supercomputers and computer clusters to solve advanced computation problems. Overview HPC integrates systems administration (including network and security knowledge) and parallel programming into ...

cloud computing Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...

and data storage resources, is part of the national eResearch infrastructure.

Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation

QFAB Bioinformatics is a unit of the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation (QCIF), a

not-for-profit A not-for-profit or non-for-profit organization (NFPO) is a Legal Entity, legal entity that does not distribute surplus funds to its members and is formed to fulfill specific objectives. While not-for-profit organizations and Nonprofit organ ...

member-based organisation.

Members

Central Queensland University Central Queensland University (branded as CQUniversity) is an Australian public university based in central Queensland. CQUniversity is the only Australian university with a campus presence in every mainland state. Its main campus is at Norman ...

James Cook University James Cook University (JCU) is a public university in North Queensland, Australia. The second oldest university in Queensland, JCU is a teaching and research institution. The university's main campuses are located in the tropical cities of Cair ...

The University of Queensland The University of Queensland is a public research university located primarily in Brisbane, the capital city of the Australian state of Queensland. Founded in 1909 by the Queensland parliament, UQ is one of the six sandstone universities, an i ...

University of Southern Queensland The University of Southern Queensland is a public research university based in Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia, the sixth largest city in the Australian state of Queensland Founded in 1967 after a successful campaign by the local Darling Down ...

Affiliate member

University of the Sunshine Coast The University of the Sunshine Coast (UniSC; formerly abbreviated as USC until 2022) is a public university based on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia. After opening with 524 students in 1996 as the Sunshine Coast University College, it ...

Galaxy Australia

QFAB and QCIF, together with the

University of Melbourne The University of Melbourne (colloquially known as Melbourne University) is a public university, public research university located in Melbourne, Australia. Founded in 1853, it is Australia's second oldest university and the oldest in the state ...

's Melbourne Bioinformatics, and the

's Research Computing Centre jointly built and operate Galaxy Australia, which is a major feature of the Genomics Virtual Laboratory, based on the

Galaxy (computational biology) A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek ' (), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar Sys ...

scientific workflow system A scientific workflow system is a specialized form of a workflow management system designed specifically to compose and execute a series of computational or data manipulation steps, or workflow, in a scientific application. Scientific workflow syst ...

References

{{Reflist Bioinformatics organizations 2007 establishments in Australia