Genome Lab: The new online workbench for easier data analysis

The new Galaxy Australia Genome Lab interface.

The new Galaxy Australia Genome Lab is now available for use by the Australian genomics community. This customised, user-friendly view of Galaxy Australia provides rapid access to a range of sophisticated genome assembly and annotation resources while retaining the full power of Galaxy Australia.

Genome Lab offers a curated collection of bioinformatics tools, workflows and tutorials tailored to data preparation, genome assembly and genome annotation. The new user-friendly, one-stop-shop within the Galaxy platform is the perfect place for newcomers to data analysis. All relevant tools and workflows come with descriptions and examples of required inputs to help researchers get started. For more advanced users, the full functionality of the Galaxy Australia platform is accessible through the surrounding tools panel and navigation bar. User history, jobs and data quota are shared with the main service, making it easy to switch between Genome Lab and the main Galaxy Australia interface.

Galaxy Australia provides Australian researchers with fully subsidised access to a high-performance computing network through a simple web interface. Researchers are able to undertake reproducible and transparent computational research in an accessible format, without needing any prior command line programming experience. There are over 1,500 pre-installed tools and over 350 workflows with extensive documentation, tutorials and training available. Wanting to simplify access and use by genomics researchers, the Galaxy Australia team developed the Genome Lab interface.

The development of Galaxy Australia’s Genome Lab represents an important step forward in Australian BioCommons activities to support Australian genomics researchers. The Genome Annotation and Genome Assembly Infrastructure Roadmaps identified a need to implement easily accessible platforms that contain all the tools for genome annotation and assembly in one location. The Galaxy Australia team has worked hard to deliver this for the genomics community, and will now continue to gather user feedback to enhance the Genome Lab. Stay tuned for updates, plus releases of other Labs supporting different research domains in the future.

If you are an Australian researcher with an interest in genomics, be sure to try out the new Galaxy Australia Genome Lab now!