The Australian Bioinformatics Facility (ABF) offers specialised bioinformatics services. It operates from within the Western Australian State Government Centre of Excellence in Comparative Genomics (CCG) at Murdoch University and offers an extensive range of expertise and infrastructure, including the Bioinformatics Research Laboratory (BRL), a high performance computing facility that represents unique scientific infrastructure in Australia. Of particular note is an enormous display wall allowing 18 million pixels of visualisation enabling scientists to visually interpret data and conduct in-depth analysis in a manner not previously possible.

ABF’s team offers world class expertise in the areas of:

• bioinformatics;
• computational biology;
• comparative genomics;
• molecular biology;
• internet-based software development; and
• high performance computing.

Specific bioinformatics capabilities are available as a direct service or can be incorporated in research services delivered by the ‘omics consortiums of Bioplatforms Australia. Services include:

• sequence assembly;
• gene and genome annotation;
• mapping;
• transcriptomics;
• comparative genomics;
• vaccine candidate identification;
• new tools for data alignment;
• phylogenetic analysis;
• gene expression and statistical analysis;
• peptide mass fingerprinting analysis; and
• customisation of protein datasets.