Research communities can build their own digital labs with Australian innovation: Galaxy Labs Engine

The Galaxy Labs Engine has been described in a new paper, including how it supports the easy creation of tailored research environments. Several domain-specific portals have now been generated on Galaxy Australia that guide researchers through curated and globally synchronised bioinformatics analysis resources

The Galaxy Labs Engine (GLE) allows research communities to build and synchronise their own Galaxy Labs, which guide users through curated tools, workflows, and training resources. These bespoke interfaces are especially helpful for researchers who are new to the analytical methods or technologies specific to the domain. 

Galaxy Labs are an extension of the established feature of ‘Galaxy Flavours’, subdomains which offer curated content for specific research domains. However, these subdomains have been limited by having static deployments, being difficult to replicate across servers, and often provide inconsistent user interfaces. By separating the content from technical deployment, the engine allows research communities to build custom Labs that stay synchronised with global resources through GitHub.

Development of the GLE service was led by the Galaxy Australia team, originating from a project at the ‘Aussie Outpost’ of the ELIXIR BioHackathon Europe, hosted by Australian BioCommons in 2022. 

The GLE has been used on the Galaxy Australia server to build the Microbiology and Single cell Labs, with the eDNA Lab currently being built, joining the Genome and Proteomics Labs as part of the expanding list of pre-configured Labs available. The engine is already being employed abroad by Galaxy France for their Ecology Lab, and to encourage global collaboration all Lab content is hosted in the Galaxy Project’s Codex GitHub repository. 

Reflecting on how the team is always developing new ways to empower researchers, Galaxy Australia Product Owner Dr Gareth Price noted:

‘Our goal was to make constructing a Galaxy Lab an easy and accessible process for the whole community. Our team is already looking ahead as we finalise the deployment of an AI-assisted Lab builder, again reducing the technical barriers for researchers to start on their own Lab journey.’

You can read the paper in Gigascience here: https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/giag041

Explore the Galaxy Labs here: https://www.biocommons.org.au/galaxy-labs