Galaxy Australia, the free bioinformatics analysis platform, is expected to be able to send jobs to high-performance computing environments soon.
Accessing HPC will allow Galaxy Australia to produce de novo assembled genomes and transcriptomes with ease, as well as process large plant genomes.
Successful test jobs have already been executed on HPC, and regular HPC usage by Galaxy Australia is planned from April this year.
The work is being conducted to support Galaxy Australia’s growth. The platform now boasts more than 650 bioinformatics tools and more than 200 reference genomes and data sets, including a newly introduced grape genome.
Since 2016, more than 150,000 bioinformatics jobs have run on Galaxy Australia and its predecessor Galaxy-QLD, with 50 research publications having acknowledged the services.
Galaxy Australia is focused on the analysis of high-throughput sequencing and genomics data by providing a broad range of bioinformatics tools, such as tools for assembly, alignment, RNA-sequencing and metagenomics, and ample amount of working storage.
More than 2,000 people have been trained nationally in Galaxy Australia workshops and webinars in the last two years by RCC, QFAB (QCIF’s bioinformatics arm) and Melbourne Bioinformatics, all of which support the platform.
Galaxy Australia has seen exponential growth in registered user numbers in the last year, ending 2018 with more than 2,260 registered users. (See the 2018 Galaxy Australia infographic for more information.)
To continue to support Australian researchers, the vitis vinifera (vitVin1) genome, otherwise known as the juicing/winemaking grapevine genome, was recently added to Galaxy Australia.
The genome was made available to support genome assembly, variant detection or expression pattern studies and was based on a user request from the University of Newcastle.
The genome is available to use with the following tools: bowtie2, BWA-MEM and HiSAT2.
If you have a query about Galaxy Australia’s services, please contact QFAB’s Dr Gareth Price, Galaxy Australia’s Service Manager: g.price@qfab.org. If you have a user query, please email: help@genome.edu.au.
