Minderoo Foundation’s OceanOmics Program

The overarching goal of the Minderoo Foundation’s OceanOmics Program is to revolutionise how we measure, understand, and ultimately conserve life in our oceans. The program focuses on the advancement and implementation of environmental DNA (eDNA) technologies at speed and scale, in the context of biodiversity monitoring and marine conservation. This includes (1) designing, evaluating and deploying scalable and standardised eDNA laboratory procedures; (2) generating reference genome resources for marine vertebrate species; (3) developing novel open-source computational approaches for analysis of eDNA data; and (4) deploying such technologies and resources in the field at scale, covering both spatial and temporal dimensions, including high-throughput automated and/or autonomous solutions for seawater sampling and eDNA isolation.To accelerate the generation of eDNA data for Australian marine environments, the program will collect seawater samples for eDNA analyses throughout the Commonwealth marine estate. Over the past 2.5 years (2021-2023), we have visited and produced data from a number of Australian Marine Parks within the North-West and South-West networks. To date, our main output is sequencing data from Australian waters for fish community description, with the raw sequencing reads deposited in the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), one bioproject per expedition area.