Human Genome Browser staff visit

The UCSC Genome Browser is one of the primary websites where human genome annotations are organized, stored and visualized, and has been running for 26 years. The UCSC Browser Group and Galaxy have been working together since the very beginning in the 2000s. As members of the human genome project, Jim Kent, David Haussler, Anton Nekrutenko and their staff organized the original table browser exporter where the human genome data annotations can be exported into Galaxy.

With more and more genomes, and the UCSC browser providing data as binary files in track hub formats, and Galaxy having many more features, the current PI of the UCSC Genome Browser, Maximilian Haeussler, visited the Freiburg Galaxy team to explore updates to the integration of the two platforms.

Two intense days of discussions led to an impressive list of possible enhancements and extensions to platform interoperability and of collaboration opportunities. Some of these, like visualisation outlinks to the Genome Browser from Galaxy for more Galaxy datatypes and direct import of UCSC reference data into Galaxy, should be rather easy to set up, while other ideas may take a bit longer to implement.

We will keep you updated on our progress so stay tuned over the next weeks and months!