Please tell us about AGRF

AGRF is the largest service provider for genomics in Australia. AGRF is a not for profit organization and is supported by federal and state government grants as well as revenue from doing project work. We've been in existence for over 12 years now, so we've lived through many changes in genome science. We originally started out as a Sanger sequencing and microsatellite genotyping service provider in two of our State nodes. Since then we've really escalated in terms of the different services that we offer, while branching out to other major cities.

Are there any recent projects that you found particularly interesting?

At AGRF we believe that with these new technologies it's important to showcase what they can do so we select some demonstration projects that allow both Australian scientists and overseas scientists to really see their benefit. We were recently involved with a de novo sequencing project on coral. We felt it was vital for us get our hands well and truly into de novo sequencing to understand what combination of short reads and longer fragment reads or mate pairs was appropriate in order to start the Australian push for de novo sequencing. 

Coral was chosen for a number of reasons, particularly for its environmental importance, but also because there are a great collection of coral researchers already in the country who are very excited to get some sequence. The first round of data has been generated. We've put together a collaborative group of bioinformaticians because we also feel it's important for us to help the bioinformatics community learn about these data sets. Nothing is kept confidential and if things work great, but if we try a particular approach and it needs to be modified, then the whole group learns from doing that.