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GCC2026

2026 Galaxy Community Conference — IUT Clermont Auvergne, Université Clermont Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France · June 22–24, 2026 (main conference), with training and CoFest June 25–26.

Status: ✅ built from the published program. Conference concluded; source material public and stable. All 35 talks, 74 posters/demos, 10 BoFs, and the keynote are documented from the official schedule and the 130-page abstract book. Video exists — three day-long recordings, publicly posted — but has not yet been transcript-harvested. See What to harvest next.

  • Hosts: Université Clermont Auvergne (UCA) and the Institut Français de Bioinformatique (IFB / ELIXIR-FR), co-organized with Johns Hopkins University; the AuBi platform is credited by IFB
  • Attendance: ~200 in person plus ~50 remote via video link (figure from the IFB/ELIXIR-FR recap; Galaxy Project publishes no number)
  • Program Committee chair: Enis Afgan (Johns Hopkins University)
  • Event site: galaxyproject.org/events/gcc2026
  • Abstract book: 130-page PDF — every talk and poster with full abstract
  • Video: Galaxy Community Conference 2026 playlist — three day-long recordings

Why this is in the vault

The headline finding: GCC2026 was an AI-agents conference wearing a workflow-platform's clothes. An entire talk session, most of another, the new fishbowl discussion format, and a dedicated Birds-of-a-Feather were given over to running Galaxy agentically — MCP servers, agent frameworks, LLM-generated tools, and the reproducibility problem that follows. For a corpus tracking agentic AI, this is the most substantial body of implemented, deployed agentic-science engineering in the collection, as opposed to conference talks about the idea.

The convergence is worth stating plainly: PSB 2026 in January and GCC2026 in June — unrelated communities, six months apart — both had agentic AI as their dominant emergent thread. See PSB themes.

Three further reasons:

  1. It completes the workflow-tooling axis. The corpus has eurobioc-2025/ for the Bioconductor/R side and nextflow-2026/ for the Nextflow side. Galaxy is the third pillar, and GCC2026 talks explicitly bridge all three (the BioFAIR Pathfinder project connects Bioconductor, Galaxy, and nf-core).
  2. Single-cell and spatial omics has a Galaxy community now. The SPOC SIG (Single-cell & sPatial Omics Community), a dedicated BoF, a FAIR-workflows talk, and four posters — a real thread, connecting to aacr-2026/topics/single-cell-spatial-omics/.
  3. The material is genuinely open. Full abstracts for all 35 talks and 74 posters, complete BoF and CoFest documentation, three video recordings, and slide deposits on HAL, Zenodo, and F1000Research. Very little is gated.

Program shape

Day Content
Mon Jun 22 Open and welcome · Galaxy Live! · Overview of Galaxy SIGs · Talks 1 — framework and platform direction · Talks 2 — infrastructure, federation, service operations · Posters 1 (37) · Talks 3 — communities, provenance, cross-domain · BoFs ×5
Tue Jun 23 Keynote — Rayan Chikhi · Talks 4 — FAIR workflows and public health · Talks 5 — tool integration and method development · Lightning talks · Posters 2 (37) + ELIXIR virtual posters · ELIXIR F2F · conference dinner
Wed Jun 24 Galaxy Community Update · Talks 6 — AI, workflows, guided analysis · Fishbowl discussion · Talks 7 — community platforms and field reports · Galaxy in Research · closing · BoFs ×5
Thu–Fri Jun 25–26 Training (3 parallel tracks each morning) · CoFest (16–19 projects, ~85+ contributors)

Talks are a rigid 15 minutes (12 + 3 Q&A), which makes deriving per-talk video offsets from session chapter markers tractable.

Organization

conferences/gcc-2026/
├── index.md              # this page
├── talks/index.md        # all 35 talks, by session, with abstracts summarized
├── keynote-chikhi.md     # Rayan Chikhi — petabase-scale sequence indexing
├── themes.md             # cross-cutting synthesis, incl. the fishbowl consensus
└── community.md          # BoFs, SIGs, training, CoFest, sponsors

Organizing committee

The only pages on the entire GCC2026 site that publish affiliations are the organizers page and the keynote bio — see the caveat below.

Organizing Committee: Ahmed Awan (Johns Hopkins) · Anthony Bretaudeau (GenOuest / IRISA-CNRS / IFB) · Bérénice Batut (IFB & Auvergne Bioinformatique, UCA) · Enis Afgan (Johns Hopkins) · Gildas Le Corguillé (Station Biologique de Roscoff / Sorbonne Université / IFB) · Jenn Vessio (Johns Hopkins) · Natalie Whitaker-Allen (Johns Hopkins) · Tyler Collins (Johns Hopkins) · Marie Jossé (CNRS)

Scientific Program Committee — chair Enis Afgan (JHU), with Daniela Schneider (Freiburg), Hans-Rudolf Hotz (FMI Basel), Helge Hecht (Masaryk), Leonid Kostrykin (Heidelberg), Marie Jossé (CNRS / Data Terra), Mohammad Saeed Tajdary (Isfahan), Oriana Barros (Aveiro), Pavan Videm (Freiburg), Pratik Jagtap (Minnesota), Sunita Sharma (Georgia), Wolfgang Maier (Freiburg), Yvan Le Bras (MNHN).

Sponsors: Silver — Data Terra, PNDB. Bronze — GalaxyWorks, IFB, de.NBI, Limagrain. Friend of GCC — SFBI. Fellowships from the JXTX Foundation, the JJ Fund, the Galaxy Community Fund, and GTA2026 scholarships.

What we have to work with

Source Coverage Notes
Schedule full program + inline abstracts for every talk galaxyproject.org/events/gcc2026/schedule/ — authoritative for final running order
Abstract book 35 talks + 74 posters, 130 pp. PDF — posters are pp. 53–130
Video 3 day-long recordings playlist — session-level chapters only
Main recap overview galaxyproject.org/news/2026-07-06-gcc2026-recap/
Fishbowl summary AI consensus points news/2026-07-09-gcc2026-fishbowl-summary/
CoFest outcomes 16–19 projects news/2026-07-20-gcc2026-cofest-outcomes/
SIG recaps ML, microGalaxy ML SIG · microGalaxy
BoFs / training / organizers full lists /bofs/, /training/, /organizers/ under the event site
Slides & posters ~20 deposits, decentralized HAL (13 confirmed), Zenodo (ad-hoc), F1000Research (French mirrors) — see community.md
IFB recap attendance figures ifb-elixir.fr

Known data caveats

  • No speaker affiliations exist for the 35 talks. Neither the schedule nor the 130-page abstract book publishes institutional affiliations for presenters. Affiliations are available only for the organizing and program committees and the keynote. Any affiliation column would be inference — we do not present one.
  • Per-talk video links do not exist. The playlist holds exactly three videos, one per day, with chapters at session granularity. Anyone citing an individual GCC2026 talk URL is mistaken. Per-talk offsets must be derived from the rigid 15-minute slot structure.
  • Lightning talk titles and speakers were never published anywhere. Recoverable only from the Day 2 video, from 2:58:34.
  • Galaxy Live!, Galaxy Community Update, Galaxy in Research, and the fishbowl participants are unnamed on every page. Video only.
  • The abstract book cover says "June 23-26, 2026" — an error. Every other source says June 22–26.
  • The abstract book and final schedule disagree on running order. A Marburg-virus phylogenomics talk (Bashea Chala et al., Ethiopia's first outbreak) was dropped from Talks 4 and kept as a poster, shifting that session up a slot; Talks 6 was also reordered. Trust the schedule page.
  • Poster counts double-count. 37 + 37 = 74 listed items, but GCC allows "talk & poster" submission, so distinct works number fewer.
  • Training instructors are unpublished for five of six workshops.
  • No GCC2027 date or location has been announced — the recap's "Looking Ahead to GCC2027" heading is empty.

What to harvest next

  1. Transcribe the three day recordings. This is the single highest-value action for this vault: it would recover the lightning talks, the Galaxy Live! and Community Update content, the fishbowl exchange, and per-talk detail — turning this from a program-derived vault into a transcript-backed one like SCGD26.
  2. Mine the poster half of the abstract book (pp. 53–130). The single-cell/spatial and public-health posters are not yet represented here beyond the named highlights.
  3. Follow the agentic-Galaxy engineering artifacts — galaxy-mcp PR #89, galaxy PR #23027, total-perspective-vortex PR #198 — which are the working code behind Talks 1 and Talks 6.

Sources