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Rob Edwards’ bioinformatics lab at Flinders University is all about decoding life’s best-kept secrets. These secrets are encoded, as you must have already guessed, in genomes of bacteria, archaea, eukaryotes and especially the viruses that infect them.

We use all kinds of computers, from clusters to cell phones, to solve the most unsolvable computational problems that help us better understand biology.

You can learn more about our research in the 2023 Fearless Research magazine

We have been funded by research agencies all over the world to help understand viruses, and we have even done some work on the virus that rampaged the world in 2020/2021.

Some of these viruses – especially phages – can be very useful, and Rob and his team have worked on isolating and characterizing those viruses, some of which are being used to treat patients in Australia and the US.

Rob’s team are also renowned for their computational toolsets. They deliver bioinformatics programs to solve some of the biggest puzzles, and love getting deep into the code to solve challenging problems. But they are not only computer experts – they also do field work and laboratory work. Check out some of those videos below!

Rob has collaborations all over the world, and has taught in Europe, Asia, and Latin America, and has taught bioinformatics, microbiology, computer science, and marine sciences course in Brazil and the US.

Rob has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, and given an equal number of talks. A short biography about Rob describes his background, and his CV has more information. You can contact Rob for more information.

Lab highlights

Read more about Rob’s work and see what we do

You Tube Videos

A selection of You Tube videos about the lab. Note that Rob has a YouTube Channel with a lot of talks and classes

Fearless Research!

You can read the article or just watch the video!

New bioinformatics tools at the Microbiome Virtual International Forum (MVIF)

Using supercomputers to analyse metagenomes

Sailing the Viromic Seas

CrAssphage

Sequencing on the boat