GCC2024 celebrates Galaxy Australia contributions

BY DR Gareth Price, Project Lead of Galaxy Australia

The 2024 Galaxy Community Conference was held in Brno, Czech Republic - a city best associated with Gregor Mendel’s contributions to our understanding of heredity. I was lucky enough to attend in person, along with Catherine Bromhead - Lead of Galaxy Australia’s Infrastructure team - thanks to Australian BioCommons funding. At the event, I was extremely proud of how frequently the Galaxy Australia team were cited as important contributors to global initiatives!

Catherine delivered a presentation - Metascheduling with TPV: Weighting jobs on multiple constraints for distributed deployment over local and remote resources - that described her work with Justin Lee and Nuwan Goonasekera. Her talk was enthusiastically received, with Galaxy Admins from around the globe quick to ask if the work can be adopted for use on their services - for which the answer is a firm yes! This work builds on Galaxy Australia’s previous open-science contribution of TPV by now providing further nuanced control of job scheduling, which benefits users by maximising the number of concurrent jobs they can run.

Catherine was also among the founding participants of Galaxy VENUS, a meeting of the women and non-binary members of the Galaxy community, which promises to become a staple at future GCCs. Launched by Wendi Bacon, Natalie Kucher, Bérénice Batut, Helena Rasche, and Saskia Hiltemann, it’s fantastic to see diversity as a key focus for the Galaxy community. 

It was great to see the Galaxy Australia team receiving numerous ‘shout-outs’ during presentations and on posters, including:

My snapshots of the Galaxy Australia team’s shoutouts

  • Nuwan for his work on Galaxy’s password vault, and his contributions to estimating cloud computing costs when running bioinformatics workloads - stay tuned for a publication soon!

  • Anna Syme for her contributions to globally recognised high-quality and robust workflows, as issued by Galaxy’s Intergalactic Workflow Commission. 

  • Anna and the entire Aussie Outpost of ELIXIR’s BioHackathon 2023 were pointed out as key contributors to new community-driven standards development for reference genome generation. 

  • Johan Gustafsson (Australian BioCommons) received mentions for his work on the Galaxy Tool Metadata Extractor plus efforts to link Galaxy Australia workflows with WorkflowHub.

  • Cameron Hyde and Grace Hall for their pioneering work on Alphafold 2 for Galaxy

  • Cameron again for wrapping the interactive tool CellxGene, which is used in a set of reproducible single cell RNA-seq analysis pipelines for understanding early persister cells in cancer.

On a personal note, I was appreciative to receive a mention for participation in SPOC - the Single cell and sPatial Omics Community of practice. I also enjoyed presenting the achievements and plans for Galaxy Australia, as part of the annual State of the Galaxy talk, given by the leads of the major usegalaxy.* services. This was on the back of representing our national service at the important pre-conference satellite meeting, the Galaxy Directions Summit. The Summit galvanised an action I was keen to advance, which I did alongside Natalie Kurcher from John Hopkins University, to reboot the Galaxy Project Roadmap through open solicitation of ideas to be captured in the 2024 - 2026 vision for Galaxy. 

GCC always ends on a high note with CoFest - two full days for all the excitement, energy and new learnings of GCC to be poured into the Galaxy code! Attending in person meant Catherine and I could get stuck in and make some big collaborative advances. Catherine worked on critical dependency refreshes for Galaxy, namely Python 3.13 and NumPy 2, while I worked with Wendi Bacon on the global unification of Galaxy Labs - read the recent Galaxy publication for more details. At CoFest, the Galaxy Lab style created in Australia by Cameron Hyde was adopted for global use, with the Single Cell Galaxy Lab migrated from Galaxy Europe into the global codebase. This work will continue at this year’s BioHackathon, including at the Australian Outpost.

As with each Galaxy Community Conference when it wraps up, I’m filled with energy to keep delivering Galaxy as a high-quality service to Australian researchers. Part of this excitement comes from knowing when we, the Galaxy community, will all get together again. It was tough to keep under wraps like we were asked, but as I write I’m now again excited about GCC2025, hosted in Cold Spring Harbour with the BioConductor community and celebrating Galaxy Projects 20th year. Find out more in the announcement.

And finally, a few pictures from around Brno!

Dr Gareth Price, Galaxy Australia