Tomas Klingström from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and part of the amazing B3Africa project used the Freiburg Galaxy server for this training last week. Read his guest post here:

Advances in molecular biology make it possible to analyse more and more samples in research projects. As a result there is an increasing need for the development of infrastructures capable of collecting large numbers of samples over time and make them available to. To manage these sample collections biobanks are being established and expanded across the world. To support the development of biobanks and increase collaboration between Africa and Europe the Bridging Biobanking and Biomedical Research across Europe and Africa (B3Africa) project was initiated.

A key component of the project is the eB3Kit which is a comprehensive informatics platform for biobanks and associated research. The eB3Kit includes a number of tools for data collection, management of samples and bioinformatics which can be further extended using the Basic Infrastructure Building Box (BIBBOX) toolbox. During the last week of November a joint symposium and workshop was organised by The Biobank and Cohort Building Network (BCNet) together with the B3Africa project to develop biobanks and provide hands on training for potential users from several African, European and Asian countries.

For the bioinformatics session the Galaxy team at the University of Freiburg kindly offered their help and computation capacity to support the training. The training was carried out using the Galaksio interface which runs on a Python web server and can communicate with any Galaxy server using Bioblend and the Galaxy API. After registering on the Freiburg Galaxy server the participants could log in to a local Galaksio server running inside the eB3Kit and send the data for analysis using workflows and computing capacity provided by the Freiburg Galaxy server.