Galaxy is a free, open-source platform that is a must-have for the life science research community. Thanks to its “click-button” web interface, Galaxy enables non-experts of the Unix command line to analyze their data. But Galaxy is much more than that: it enables the creation and sharing of workflows, as a showcase for tool developers who, via the Galaxy catalog, ensure their wide distribution, and thus link up with the Rstudio and Jupyter environments… The project’s ambition is to make science more FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable), by facilitating access to online calculation and command-line tools via a unified web interface or via an API.
The Galaxy community is dynamic and involved in both ecosystem enhancement and user training.
In terms of training, the Galaxy universe includes the “Galaxy Training Network”, one of the pillars of the ecosystem, which offers open and collaborative educational resources to train users in the various bioinformatics analyses on Galaxy.
IFB/ELIXIR-FR is now very involved in Galaxy. At the European level: by participating in the animation of Galaxy communities around training, and in the development of the platform. In France, by providing researchers with a national platform (Usegalaxy.fr) hosted and managed by the IFB Core Cluster.
A global platform to democratize bioinformatics
Developed in the USA, Galaxy is available through several interconnected public servers, including global instances such as usegalaxy.org (USA), usegalaxy.eu (Europe) and more national ones such as usegalaxy.org.au (Australia) and usegalaxy.fr (France). These usegalaxy platforms serve an ever-growing global community of over 500,000 users. Today, usegalaxy.fr is an ELIXIR service (SDP) accessible to the entire community.
Usegalaxy.fr: a tool for national scientific communities
The usegalaxy.fr service is managed by the IFB-core teams, and more specifically by the ABIMS, Genouest and Aubi platforms. Users benefit from storage space for their data, located in Orsay, France, on the IFB’s core cluster, which offers significant computing power and user support in French via the IFB’s Community Support website. Some of the tools installed have been developed by French teams, such as those at the MNHN or Workflow4Metabolomics.
Usegalaxy.fr and its community in a few figures, it's no less than :
- 97 computing nodes
- 4800 CPU cores
- 63 TB of RAM
- 4 PB of storage
- More than 9000 users
- 5.5Mjobs by mid-2025 2025
- 1850 tools classified by theme
Galaxy France offers 10 subdomains (< subdomain> .usegalaxy.fr) : ecology; metabarcoding; proteore; covid19; workflow4metabolomics; met4j ; plant-pathogens; mnhn ; microbiology; singlecell.
Today, Galaxy France is recognized as an essential national resource in bioinformatics, and its impact is multiple:
- The point of contact between the French and international Galaxy communities;
- The basis for analysis of major national and European research projects, such as ABRomics, EOSC, PEPR ATLASea and Galaxy-BioProd (PEPR B-Best);
- The IFB/ELIXIR-FR training teams offer a wide range of Galaxy training courses at national and European level.
To learn more about Galaxy France and join the community, visit usegalaxy.fr .