Source: Northern Territory Police and Fire Services
Diversity Arrays is a Canberra-based social enterprise using science and data to help address some of the world’s greatest challenges, including climate change and food sustainability and food security.
Dr Andrzej Kilian founded Diversity Arrays in 2001. What started out slowly, has grown to a large organisation with over 60 employees and over 2,500 clients across 70 different countries.
As a spinoff from private not-for-profit, Diversity Arrays received initial funding through the Commonwealth’s Biotechnology Innovation Fund Project.
The ACT Government played an early role in Diversity Array’s journey too, by matching federal funding with $200,000 to help them start.
Diversity Arrays came to life when Dr Kilian invented a process for rapidly genotyping any organism without the need for previous DNA sequence information.
Dr Kilian said this meant they could take the DNA from any microorganism, plant or animal to analyse many fragments of DNA. Essentially his invention could generate genome profiles based on thousands or even millions of DNA fragments and generate more data, faster and more cost effectively than ever before.
“When we started 20 years ago, any kind of DNA sequencing was very expensive. Diversity Arrays was transformative at the time, and it reduced the cost significantly. We primarily worked in agriculture, but as we evolved, our services became more diverse too,” Dr Kilian said.
“Now we have three domains to our business, laboratory services, software development and data analytics. We were producing all this data, but we had to come up with a way to process all this knowledge and make it available in a way our clients could understand and put it to best use. That’s when the software arm of our business developed.”
In 2018, Diversity Arrays received matched funding of $1.2 million from the ACT Government’s Priority Investment Program (PIP).
The PIP grants foster innovation and collaboration between, industry, research institutions and universities to solve industry needs.
Working with the Australian National University (ANU) and University of Canberra (UC), Diversity Arrays invested about $3 million to help bring a new arm of software to life in a platform then known as EcoKDDart.
They combined DNA sequencing with a host of ecological data that was being published in academic journals, but not stored securely for longer term usage and in a more meaningful way to help industries relying on such research.
“The PIP grant helped us develop the software and analytical tools with ANU and UC for an ecological data management system,” Dr Kilian said.
“We already had a data management system for breeding and agriculture, but ecology had very different needs. By integrating the two systems it’s allowed us to answer questions we didn’t even know we could ask.”
Dr Kilian said the evolution of EcoKDDart was in progress and would be launched later this year or early in 2024. Known as Ecologue, it will combine the three parts of their business – lab, software development and data analytics – into one integrated platform.
Ecologue will allow farmers, breeders, scientists and ecologists to improve the viability of their farms, quality of their yields and the value of their research.
“Practically, it means we generate large volume of genetic data from a small piece of a leaf, a single grain, small biopsy or hair sample. Alongside historical data on crop performance, weather, soil and biodiversity in the area, we get data we’ve never had before,” Dr Kilian said.
“It allows farms to select new varieties of crops and adapt them to meet future changing global weather patterns and climate change, produce better yields and improve food security and sustainability.
“The impacts are huge. We’re seeing modern genetic research and technology, and big data help deliver better economic, social, agricultural and environmental outcomes for the planet.”
Dr Kilian became an “accidental entrepreneur” through failure to commercialise his invention over 22 years ago.
“I didn’t want this technology to fall under exclusive rights with a multinational corporation. I wanted this technology to be available to for everyone,” he said.
“I believe it can help provide a solution to our planet’s greatest needs, climate change, food security, sustainability and nutrition. We need a new food production and cropping system for the world that’s more sustainable and moves away from mono-cropping. One that reduces chemical intervention, but still meets the world’s food needs and is sustainable for our planet.”
The ACT Government’s PIP grant is currently open and close 31 October 2023.
For more information, visit the PIP website.
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