Empowering life science researchers: New software on Galaxy Australia breaks down barriers

Galaxy Australia has been updated with two powerful software packages installed and fully subsidised for Australian researchers to use. 

Specialised bioinformatics tools, like the newly available Fgenesh++ and Cell Ranger, are frequently required for life sciences data analyses. Individual researchers are often unable or not confident to accept licensing conditions and associated charges, or are unable to upload a licence file. Now, Galaxy Australia has opened the door to use these proprietary bioinformatics tools by negotiating licences which come at no additional cost to the user. Researchers using Galaxy Australia also receive fully subsidised access to a national high-performance computing network, enabling complex data analyses to be performed in the user-friendly web interface.

Fgenesh++ is a bioinformatics pipeline for automatic prediction of genes in eukaryotic genomes with extensive guidance available. It produces fully automated genome annotations of a quality similar to manual annotation, and is extremely fast compared to some other automated genome annotation pipelines. In response to requests from the genomics community, BioCommons licenced Fgenesh++ from Softberry and provide fully subsidised access for Australian-based research groups and research consortia via our Fgenesh++ Service. Now, individuals who would like access can also apply to use it through Galaxy Australia.

The second software package, Cell Ranger, was added to Galaxy Australia following requests from the single cell omics community. Cell Ranger is a set of analysis pipelines that count how many times something occurs within a cell. It processes 10x Genomics Chromium single cell data to align reads, generate feature-barcode matrices, perform clustering and other secondary analyses, and much more (see the list of example workflows and supported libraries). Cell Ranger contains in-built reference genome data, and can be integrated with the interactive CellXgene environment in Galaxy Australia for data visualisation. 
If you are an Australian researcher interested in using either of these powerful software packages via Galaxy Australia, apply for access today.