Thousands join international Galaxy training events
The Galaxy platform is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. This collaborative data analysis platform is widely used by scientists around the world, and underpins many computational biology services. Galaxy Australia is one of the core services BioCommons delivers, so naturally we provide lots of opportunities for researchers to engage with the team, community and tools.
The Galaxy Australia team recently supported the Singapore Biology League, who chose to incorporate Galaxy into their online collaborative biology contest for the first time. This massive event welcomed over 2000 pre-university students who formed teams to run 2054 tools on Galaxy Australia over 4 hours. It was a great opportunity to broaden participants’ exposure to biology and bioinformatics beyond the school curriculum.
The week-long Galaxy Training Academy attracted more than 3500 people from across the globe this year. Seventy three Australian researchers were amongst the international cohort joining from their homes and offices to work through tutorials, with support as they needed it. Live help was provided in our time zones by Galaxy Australia’s Dr Anna Syme, Dr Igor Makunin and Dr Tristan Reynolds, who fielded questions on a wide range of topics from fungal genomics to bat ecology! Participants brought their own specialities as they learned how to use the fully subsidised Galaxy Australia platform for proteomics, genome assembly, transcriptomics, single cell RNAseq, microbiome analysis, machine learning and more.
In the lead up to the Galaxy Training Academy, BioCommons’ Dr Tiffanie Nelson and Galaxy Australia’s Dr Tristan Reynolds helped researchers understand what’s possible by presenting the webinar: No code, no problem: data analysis for biologists with Galaxy Australia. Examples included how Galaxy Australia is being used for biosecurity screening, foodborne pathogen detection and building reference genomes of the critically endangered swift parrot, as well as a tour of the practical features of Galaxy Australia that make sophisticated workflows like these accessible to all, regardless of their computational skills.
Get started by exploring the tutorials available: Galaxy Training Network
If you’re an existing Galaxy Australia user, improve your methods with our Top Tips videos