Galaksio, a user friendly workflow-centric front end for Galaxy

Abstract

There is a severe shortage of statisticians and bioinformaticians available in research. As universities fail to cover the increasing need of graduates with the necessary skills, ad hoc training and workshops have become commonplace but are insufficient to cover the needs. Technical solutions that distribute the workload more efficiently between researchers with a different education background (e.g., computer scientists and biologists) are therefore necessary to cover some of this shortage. Galaksio provides a workflow-centric graphical user interface for the Galaxy Workflow Management system easy to use for biologists and medical researchers who need to run routine tasks in bioinformatics. Combined with back end tools such as BioBlend, CloudMan and Pulsar, Galaksio provides a novel, layered approach to Galaxy making it easier to divide research tasks to researchers depending on their skills in interdisciplinary subjects such as bioinformatics and computational science. Galaksio is developed by the B3Africa project for the eB3Kit but functions as a stand-alone server that can be configured for to be connected to any Galaxy server using the Galaxy API. Galaksio can be downloaded at: https://github.com/fikipollo/galaksio .