Services

DNA / RNA Bioinformatics

The Freiburg Galaxy Team offers several services to enable reproducible and accessible research for everyone:

 

Galaxy server

Our flagship service is our Galaxy server (https://usegalaxy.eu) which is the biggest Galaxy instance in Europe, and one of the biggest worldwide. With this server we provide public access to a huge compute and storage resource. Galaxy gives you access to more than 1000 different, well-documented, and constantly maintained bioinformatics tools. This effort, combined with our community-maintained workflows and our in-depth training material, makes for a truly productive work experience. The work we do enables everyone to perform reproducible science.

 

Training

The Freiburg Galaxy Team offers various training events worldwide. From supporting researchers by educating them in e.g. big data analysis, programming, and data management, to Galaxy server administration, we believe that sharing of knowledge and the open science movement is a key point in future. In Freiburg, twice per year we offer a full-week hands-on high-throughput sequencing data analysis workshop. Registration is possible through our website (https://usegalaxy.eu) .

The Freiburg Galaxy Team is leading the effort for the community driven development of Galaxy training material (https://galaxyproject.github.io/training-material). All of this material is online, freely accessible for everyone. Depending on your resources and your requirements, you can use this material on our Galaxy instance or you can spin up your own Galaxy server!

If you want to offer a training course to other researchers, we do maintain a set of materials to “train the trainers” and we are happy to share our knowledge and experience in this area with you. We provide training material for Galaxy developers and admins, as well as the possibility to use Jupyter notebooks directly in Galaxy.

 

 

Training Infrastructure-as-a-Service (TIaaS)

We are very excited to offer a new service for Galaxy trainers: Training infrastructure as a Service! If you have a training event planned, get in touch with us and we will allocate dedicated compute resources for the duration of your training for all your trainees. Your users’ jobs will be directed to these resources and are free from the regular job queue. No setup, no queueing times, no hassle. Just drop us a mail and concentrate on the important things during your training.

 

Virtualized deployments

Our aim is to provide all researchers with easy access to tools, wherever they need them. Wasting valuable time in compilation hell or in frustrating conversations with cluster admins because tools are not available should not continue to be a constant source of frustration. Therefore, we are co-leading the Bioconda (http://bioconda.github.io) and BioContainers (https://biocontainers.pro) projects which, together, form the best stack for reproducible science ever (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/11/200683, https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/10/27/207092).

 

Galaxy flavors

We offer access to a wide variety of compute and storage resources through the Galaxy portal. The European Galaxy server is our way to make all of our services such as training, tools, data analysis, and the de.NBI cloud available to you. However, we don’t want to restrict anyone, or make anyone dependent on our services as we believe in freedom of research and open access in science. For this reason we have developed a virtualized Galaxy instance, a “Galaxy instance in a box”. It is a production-ready, scalable Galaxy instance, complete with all the features that makes Galaxy so popular. We maintain and offer this Galaxy instance for download in a variety of different “flavors”. For example, the RNA-workbench flavour (https://github.com/bgruening/galaxy-rna-workbench) for all RNA related research, the ASaiM (http://asaim.readthedocs.io) flavor for metagenomics, or one dedicated to epigenetic research (https://github.com/bgruening/docker-galaxy-epigenetics).

 

Data analysis

You don’t have time to analyse your data, or have a highly specialized question? Our team consists of experts in different fields and we are eager to assist you and solve your scientific question with you! We have a long track record of solving advance NGS analysis tasks in tight collaborations with experimental groups.

 

Tool integration

Do you have a scientific question and can’t find the appropriate tool for it? We put ideas into code, and then code into Galaxy, so everyone can use it!

 

Scientific computing cloud

As part of the German Network for Bioinformatics Infrastructure de.NBI (https://www.denbi.de), we maintain a scientific cloud for our users. If you have special needs or require a virtualized computing environment for your research, get in touch with us and we will work with you to develop a personalised solution.