The Galaxy Australia service is being chosen by large numbers of researchers from around Australia to complete their bioinformatics analyses. Rapid uptake of the service has seen millions of jobs submitted across a broad spectrum of critical research questions with hard-hitting outcomes for the real world.

Here we highlight the work of Dr Rhys Parry, who recently submitted the three millionth job to Galaxy Australia. Rhys uses Galaxy Australia extensively in his current role as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Professor Alexander Khromykh’s RNA Virology Lab in the School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, University of Queensland.

Currently utilising Galaxy Australia for RNA-Seq analysis and assembly of SARS-CoV-2 genomes, Rhys has become a power user since he was first encouraged by his PhD supervisor, Professor Sassan Asgari, School of Biological Sciences, University of Queensland, to make use of Galaxy and the Galaxy training resources.

The *Aedes aegypt*i (top) and *Aedes albopictus* mosquitoes (below) vector many pathogenic viruses to humans, but non-human viruses remain elusive. Bioinformatics tools from Galaxy Australia helped explore the virome of these mosquitoes. (Picture of mosquitoes by Ana L. Ramírez.)

For my PhD project I assembled close to 4000 RNA-Seq datasets from samples from all over the world - a task that would have been impossible without Galaxy Australia
— Rhys Parry

On the hunt for mosquito-borne viruses, Rhys undertook ‘Trinity’ de novo assembly of the transcriptomes of two medically important mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, the yellow fever mosquito and Aedes albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito. These two mosquitoes vector significant viruses including Dengue, Zika and Yellow fever. The research not only improved our understanding of the microbiome and virome of these mosquito species, but discovered many novel viruses including one that was pathogenic to humans.

Recognising the value of Galaxy Australia beyond virus discovery and transcriptome assembly, Rhys has also used Galaxy for bacterial de novo assembly and RNA-Seq pipelines and annotation and small RNA mapping and analysis.

For the past few years, my bioinformatics analyses have used Galaxy Australia extensively to avoid the expense of proprietary software and to allow for reproducible and modular pipelines
— Rhys Parry

Six publications resulting from this work have acknowledged the Galaxy Australia team for not only the maintenance and provision of essential computational resources, but also for the technical assistance and scientific advice that individual team members Dr Gareth Price and Dr Igor Makunin provide users of the Galaxy Australia service.

Parry, R., James, M. E., & Asgari, S. (2021). Uncovering the Worldwide Diversity and Evolution of the Virome of the Mosquitoes Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. Microorganisms, 9(8), 1653. https://doi.org/10.3390/microorganisms9081653

Madhav, M., Parry, R., Morgan, J. A., James, P., & Asgari, S. (2020). Wolbachia endosymbiont of the horn fly (Haematobia irritans irritans): a Supergroup A strain with multiple horizontally acquired cytoplasmic incompatibility genes. Applied and environmental microbiology, 86(6), e02589-19. https://doi.org/10.1128/aem.02589-19

Parry, R., Wille, M., Turnbull, O. M., Geoghegan, J. L., & Holmes, E. C. (2020). Divergent influenza-like viruses of amphibians and fish support an ancient evolutionary association. Viruses, 12(9), 1042. https://doi.org/10.3390/v12091042

Bishop, C., Parry, R., & Asgari, S. (2020). Effect of Wolbachia wAlbB on a positive-sense RNA negev-like virus: A novel virus persistently infecting Aedes albopictus mosquitoes and cells. Journal of General Virology, 101(2), 216-225. https://doi.org/10.1099/jgv.0.001361

Parry, R., Naccache, F., Ndiaye, E. H., Fall, G., Castelli, I., Lühken, R., ... & Becker, S. C. (2020). Identification and RNAi profile of a novel iflavirus infecting Senegalese Aedes vexans arabiensis mosquitoes. Viruses, 12(4), 440. https://doi.org/10.3390/v12040440

Parry, R., & Asgari, S. (2019). Discovery of novel crustacean and cephalopod flaviviruses: insights into the evolution and circulation of flaviviruses between marine invertebrate and vertebrate hosts. Journal of virology, 93(14), e00432-19. https://doi.org/10.1128/JVI.00432-19

Some research presented here received funding through ARC grants DP190102048 and DP150101782 and a University of Queensland PhD scholarship.

Virus research tips Galaxy Australia over 3 million jobs