High-throughput collection genomics of highly variable DNA samples

Biodiversity conservation, biosecurity, and human health will be accelerated and enhanced by genomic information about our biodiversity.

We previously developed an inexpensive, high-throughput process to obtain genomic information from biological specimens, and demonstrated that it can be applied to preserved specimens held in our National Research Collections Australia across the tree of life. This platform is already being used to underpin significant biosecurity programs for industry and government. However, some biodiversity specimens, especially freshly collected specimens that retain high quality DNA, require bespoke treatment, which slows down the process. In this new project we will use microfluidic shearing and transposon-based library construction to create uniform input DNA for our pipeline so that it becomes a truly universally high-throughput process.

Lead: Andreas Zwick
Collaborators: National Collections & Marine Infrastructure; Land and Water; Data61; University of Technology, Sydney