$246,000 grant from Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's Essential Open Source Software for Science program

Life science is fast becoming a data science.

Dr Nuwan Goonasekera, bioinformatics developer at Melbourne Bioinformatics, FMDHS, will share a $246,000 grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s (CZI) Essential Open Source Software for Science program.

This program supports software maintenance, growth, development and community engagement for critical tools in biomedical research. The project, Extending Galaxy for Large-scale and Integrative Biomedical Analyses, will enable life scientists to readily view, fetch and analyse data from Google storage and the CZI Human Cell Atlas using Galaxy on the cloud.

Galaxy is a global, open source, web-based platform for life scientists to do data analysis without needing computer programming skills.

Director of Australian BioCommons and Senior Advisor at Melbourne Bioinformatics, Associate Professor Andrew Lonie, said the team had been working together for some years now, more recently developing features for Galaxy to function better in distributed and cloud computing environments.

"This grant acknowledges and strengthens this collaboration, enabling more coordinated efforts and, through that work, better infrastructure for our life science researchers," he said.