Computation and Informatics in Biology and Medicine (CIBM) Seminar:
Low-cost, high-throughput DNA sequencing has become widespread and is revolutionizing biomedical research and clinical care alike. In the era of pervasive genomics, the greatest challenge is making sense of large sequencing datasets. The Galaxy platform (http://galaxyproject.org, http://usegalaxy.org) is a popular Web-based workbench that enables accessible, reproducible, and collaborative analysis of genomic data. Galaxy makes it easy for anyone, regardless of their programming experience, to analyze large genomic datasets. Galaxys visual analytics framework advances the state-of-the-art in interactive high-performance genomics, enabling investigators to simultaneously use visualization and scientific tools to analyze genomic data.

In collaboration with the Emory Winship Cancer Institute, we are using Galaxy to analyze cancer genomes and uncover mutation-gene expression associations in cancer. Knowledge derived from these analyses can be used to improve outcomes for cancer patients, such as by determining which patients are most likely to suffer a relapse. As part of this research, we have identified opportunities for extending Galaxy to enable large, integrated clinical informatics applications.