Galaxy is a platform for scientific workflows that allows for data integration, storage, analysis, and publication. It aims to make computational biology accessible to researchers who are not familiar with programming or system administration.
Galaxy functions as a database for storing biological information and offers a graphical user interface for data manipulation. It supports a wide range of biological data formats and can translate between them. Users can upload data from various sources, including their desktops, URLs, and online resources.
Galaxy’s core functionality includes a collection of tools for analyzing biological data, particularly genomics. The platform’s tool selection has expanded significantly over time, and it is now used for research in diverse life science fields, including gene expression, genome assembly, proteomics, and more.
The Galaxy Tool Shed facilitates the sharing of tools and their installation settings among different Galaxy instances. This enables researchers to access and utilize a wider range of tools for their work.
Galaxy provides interactive analysis and visualization capabilities through its user interface. Recently, Galaxy Interactive Environments were introduced, integrating Jupyter (and soon RStudio), allowing users to perform complex analyses and create custom visualizations.
Galaxy is a community-driven project with significant contributions from developers worldwide. The project employs continuous integration services for thorough automated testing, ensuring code quality and rapid bug resolution.
Galaxy’s future development focuses on areas like toolshed improvements, data and compute federation, tighter integration of interactive environments with provenance and reuse, and enhanced training materials. The project actively encourages community involvement through its GitHub repository.
Galaxy has been used by tens of thousands of researchers daily and has been cited in over 5700 scientific publications. It has also provided a framework for over 500 developers, streamlining data analysis processes and making them observable and reusable.
The Galaxy project has experienced significant growth and improvement in recent years, making it a powerful and versatile platform for scientific research.