An Australian community for computational structural biology

The active new community is receiving support from a range of partners and advocates, including L-R Johan Gustafsson (BioCommons), Steven Manos (BioCommons), Kate Michie (UNSW) and Andrew Gilbert (Bioplatforms Australia)

The explosion of possibilities presented by deep learning approaches in structural biology research has created many new opportunities and challenges. A passionate group of structural biologists has formed the Australian Structural Biology Computing Community, to approach this new era as part of a community that shares computational knowledge, methods, and resources. 

This community-driven approach brings together a diverse group of people, with initial contributions forming around leads from the Structural Biology Facility at UNSW, and an academic panel of experts from Monash University, Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research (WEHI), University of Western Australia (UWA), Australian National University (ANU), Bio21 Institute of Molecular Science and Biotechnology (Bio21), University of Melbourne, La Trobe University, University of Queensland (UQ) - IMB, University of Sydney, Griffith University, Swinburne University of Technology, CSIRO, and the University of Adelaide. Anyone involved in structural biology in Australia is invited to join and there are lots of different ways to get involved.

The Community for Structural Biology Computing in Australia webpage is a useful new resource for all users of computing for structural biology research in Australia. The page is constantly evolving and expanding, and it currently focuses on the use of deep learning methods in Structural Biology. It includes practical guides on topics like “Best practices for presenting and sharing AlphaFold models in a paper” as well as news items and announcements for relevant courses and meetings. 

Australian BioCommons supports the community by hosting quarterly online meetings that aim to tease out how computational structural biologists’ challenges might be addressed with community-scale responses and national research infrastructure solutions. If you join the mailing list via the community webpage, you will receive updates and invitations to community meetings and the discussions in Slack.

BioCommons began providing broad, fully subsidised, access to structural prediction in 2022 by making AlphaFold2 available within its Galaxy Australia service. The Australian AlphaFold2 Service provides both an easy-to-use interface and dedicated GPUs to Australian researchers. When BioCommons hosted the international 2023 Galaxy Community Conference, the keynote speech by Chief Scientist of the Structural Biology Factility at UNSW, Kate Michie, generated much excitement around forming an Australian community of practice for computational structural biology as an avenue for collectively addressing the challenges presented by deep learning in structural biology. 

BioCommons has supported key research stakeholders to refine the new community’s purpose, began running quarterly community meetings, and helped to establish the shared community spaces like the Australian Structural Biology Computing website and GitHub. As well as facilitating consultations with infrastructure partners and the broader computational infrastructure community, a group of national panel of experts has been identified. 

This community collaborates with their peers to:

  • Collectively create and maintain community forums and centralised collaboration platforms to support collaboration and knowledge sharing (i.e. methods and documentation);

  • Foster collaboration between structural biologists, computer scientists, and data scientists, thereby creating interdisciplinary teams to help tackle complex challenges, validate results and ensure robust applications of deep learning methods;

  • Lead the review, prioritisation, testing, optimisation, and sharing of deep learning codes, software and approaches that are of broad relevance and interest to the Australian research community;

  • Develop quality assessment tools to help evaluate the quality of calculated structures, and help guide researchers towards reliable predictions; and,

  • Address the ethical implications of AI-driven structural predictions, as well as discuss transparency, bias and interpretability to ensure responsible use of these technologies.

The Australian Structural Biology Community is poised to tackle a set of pilot activities aimed at fast tracking a national response to the challenges facing computational approaches in structural biology. A much anticipated future output is an infrastructure roadmap document that will formalise and describe the high level requirements of the community. This collaborative effort between the new Australian Structural Biology Community, Australian BioCommons, and BioCommons infrastructure partners will support the Australian Structural Biology community as new needs arise relating to bioinformatics tools, software, infrastructure or training.

Keep in touch by subscribing for updates at the Community for Structural Biology Computing in Australia webpage. 

Christina Hall2025