Galaxy Australia well represented at GCC2024

Last month, Galaxy Australia team members took the rare chance to work alongside over 150 other Galaxy developers in the same time zone at the 2024 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC). With 28 countries represented in Brno, Czech Republic, GCC was the perfect meeting place to celebrate Galaxy’s successes, discuss the latest developments, and work together to improve the Galaxy platform that enables accessible, reproducible, and transparent computational biological research.

Catherine Bromhead (Galaxy Australia Infrastructure Team Lead) presented the latest developments on the Total Perspective Vortex, a job scheduling tool originally developed by the Galaxy Australia team. With even further nuanced controls available, the Aussie Vortex is being adopted by Galaxy services around the globe. 

Gareth Price (Galaxy Australia Project Lead) represented Australian interests at the Directions Summit, co-launched a forum for Galaxy users to have input on the Galaxy Project’s roadmap, and delivered the Australian section of the prestigious ‘State of the Galaxy’ annual talk. In his talk, Gareth explained that:

The Galaxy Australia team maintains a strong community focus when we develop new offerings. We’re particularly proud of delivering on requests for specialised commercially licensed tools and custom workbenches like the Genome Lab.

After four days of presentations and training workshops, the two day Collaboration Festival saw participants work on solutions and enhancements in a way that is only possible when the global team comes together. For Gareth, adapting the Genome Lab code so that it can be repurposed for any other domain across the world was a particular highlight. 

Galaxy Labs are a fantastic entry point for Galaxy users, and the team are excited to make Galaxy Australia even more accessible for a wide range of domain specialists by developing new Galaxy Labs. Stay tuned for new releases soon!

Work on Galaxy Labs will continue as just one of many exciting projects at ELIXIR’s BioHackathon. If you’re interested in a unique opportunity to participate in this significant global event and network with your international peers while working intensively on practical bioinformatics challenges, consider joining the Australian Outpost!

Read the full GCC2024 meeting report at Galaxy News.
If you’d like to keep up with plans for GCC2025, subscribe to the BioCommons newsletter or Galaxy Announcements.