| Author(s) |
 
Wendi Bacon
|
Posted on: 16 June 2026
GalaxyLabs is an international effort to make sustainable, researcher-focused and community-curated interfaces across Galaxy, from Genomics to Single-cell analyses.
The Problems
- Subdomain interfaces (Galaxy, Single-cell, etc.) were previously server-specific. This meant that if a server, such as galaxy.eu, had a genomics subdomain, there was no guarantee that same subdomain existed on other servers. Indeed, genomics community members would have to spin up their own version on a different server - from scratch! This included both content and tooling. How annoying for a Single-cell and sPatial Omics Community that works across continents!
- These different servers made training extremely difficult, where user’s experiences wildly varied when trying to follow tutorials. This often led to confusion and frustration.
- Subdomains had no template or consistent, user research informed experience - and became whatever a given individual or group might throw together. How annoying given how little time we all have, to have to collectively contribute and maintain so many sites!
The result? Work duplication, wildly different user experiences depending on the availability of subdomains on a given server and the time community contributors had to polish and maintain a site.
The Solution
After a world tour pointing out this massive waste of resources across the galaxy.* communities, the avengers assembled.
- The Australians appeared, like a star in a dark sky, with a user research tested GalaxyLabs engine - enabling rapid spinning up of community pages.
- The European members of the Single-cell and sPatial Omics Community, already experienced in unifying over duplicating subdomains threw their hat in to be the test lab, converting their content to a GalaxyLabs engine, but centralised such that every server could spin up the same instance
- The USA sys admin, Nate Coraor, logged in from a train station to push GalaxyLab created sites onto their servers as proof of principle.
The Result
A single, centralised location for community content that enables consistent user experience across any server who chooses to host a given subdomain. GalaxyLabs was a hit!
The Benefit
Community curation and maintenance of these Galaxy interfaces takes time and effort - which is now spent on a single, high quality, user research informed and reusable global instance rather than multiple, variable sites across different teams.
You can read the whole story on how this many year mission went down. You can also enjoy the fruits of this labour, when accessing the myriad of GalaxyLabs across servers.
