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GCC2026 — Community program

Everything at GCC2026 outside the talk sessions: Birds-of-a-Feather, SIGs, training, and the two-day CoFest. For a community-run platform this is where much of the real work happened, and it is unusually well documented.

Birds-of-a-Feather

Ten BoFs across two blocks, five in parallel each time. Full list from the BoF page.

Monday, 17:00–18:00

BoF Leads Room
Galaxy as the Substrate for Agent-driven Science Dannon Baker, Anton Nekrutenko Amphitheater A
Federation of instances: atypical multi-HPC integration. Is Pulsar the solution? Vlad Visan, Marie Jossé, Yvan Le Bras, Samuel Keuchkerian, Martin Carrère, Sanjay Srikakulam Amph. B
Keeping pace with best practices in single-cell and spatial omics in Galaxy Kevin Rue-Albrecht, Marisa Loach Espace doc
How to build and structure one's community: the quid of overlapping communities Marie Jossé, Beatriz Serrano-Solano, Yvan Le Bras, Jérôme Detoc, Samuel Keuchkerian Cafeteria
Access and Identity — Now that I know who you are, what do I do? Galaxy Australia team Entrance hall

The agent BoF covered driving Galaxy through Claude Code, Codex, galaxy-mcp, Loom, and Orbit. The single-cell BoF was anchored on the BioFAIR Pathfinder project and Seurat / Bioconductor / Scanpy interoperability — see Themes.

Wednesday, 17:15–18:30

BoF Leads Room
At the edge of the Galaxy, the lonely life of a (small scale) local Galaxy server admin Hans-Rudolf Hotz, Lucille Delisle —
Community Discussion on Open Source Approaches for Automated Galaxy Tool Generation Daniel Blankenberg Amph. B
Where does Galaxy's security responsibility end and yours begin? Martin Carrère, Nate Coraor Cafeteria
IDC (Intergalactic Data Commission / reference data) Matthias Bernt Salle doc
Galaxy Release Process and Test Coverage Gaps Aysam Guerler —

Special Interest Groups

Monday's Overview of Galaxy SIGs session covered the full directory: Computational Chemistry, Earth, Ecology, Genome Annotation, Materials Science, Microbiology, Public Health, Digital Humanities, Machine Learning, Metabolomics, Proteomics, Single-cell & sPatial Omics (SPOC), and Image Analysis. Directory: galaxyproject.org/community/sig/.

Two SIGs published dedicated GCC2026 recaps.

Machine Learning SIG

Led by Anup Kumar, with Michelle Savage, Paulo Morais, Dannon Baker, and Jeremy Goecks. GCC2026 contributions:

  • Poster AI/ML tools in Galaxy — Zenodo 10.5281/zenodo.21133087
  • ELIXIR BioHackathon Project 13 talk, Bridging DOME, BioAIrepo, BioModels and Galaxy — project page
  • The Machine Learning for Genomics training session (Friday), delivered by Michelle Savage and Anup Kumar using the GLEAM Image Learner GTN tutorial — biomedical image classification covering dataset splitting, pretrained backbones, and evaluation on imbalanced medical data
  • CoFest PR to galaxyproject/galaxy #23027 — validating and displaying reference URLs in LLM responses

Recap: https://galaxyproject.org/news/2026-07-01-gcc-ml-2026/

microGalaxy SIG (Microbiology)

One of the project's most developed communities. The Microbiology Galaxy Lab ships 315+ tools and 115+ curated workflows, deployed on microbiology.usegalaxy.eu, .fr, .org, and .org.au, with 30+ training events over five years. At GCC2026: multiple talks and posters, the reference-data BoF, and CoDex development during CoFest.

Recap: https://galaxyproject.org/news/2026-07-13-gcc-microbiome-2026/

Training

Thursday and Friday, 09:00–12:00, three parallel tracks each morning in rooms A128–A130.

Day Tracks
Thu Jun 25 New and Experienced User Walkthroughs · Tool Wrapping · Getting Ready for Galaxy Development in CoFest
Fri Jun 26 Developers Do Bioinformatics · Earth Science & Ecology · Machine Learning for Genomics

Instructor names are not published for five of the six sessions. Only the ML session's instructors are known (Savage and Kumar), via the ML SIG recap.

CoFest

Thursday and Friday afternoons, 13:00–18:00. 16–19 projects, ~85+ contributors. Full outcomes: https://galaxyproject.org/news/2026-07-20-gcc2026-cofest-outcomes/

Project Lead Notes
Driving Galaxy with Agents Dannon Baker 7 participants → galaxy-mcp PR #89
AI agent auto-wrap tools Enis Afgan
Galaxy CoDex Solenne Correard 6 participants
Molstar / structural biology Finn Beruldsen
GTN tool-review materials Mélanie Pétéra
GTN admin training + TPV debugging Paul De Geest total-perspective-vortex PR #198
Pangenomics Anton Nekrutenko
File sources / OpenSILEX Polina Polunina
Bioconductor tools + single-cell GTN Kevin Rue-Albrecht
Arts & humanities Eamonn Bell
Modernizing Pulsar DRMAA Matthias Bernt
Time-based quotas, pgcleanup Charles Coulombe
Galaxy on Kubernetes Keith Suderman
CVMFS reference genomes Sveinung Gundersen
Tool wrapping for public health Peter van Heusden
Metabolomics / EIRENE Helge Hecht
Ecology tools Yvan Le Bras
Grow the GTN Saskia Hiltemann
Bring workflow to IWC Lucille Delisle

Also referenced: galaxyproject/galaxy_codex PRs #690, #697, #710, #711, #712.

Slides and posters

Decentralized — there is no single GCC2026 slide repository. Three venues are in use, which means a complete harvest requires all three.

HAL (13 GCC2026 deposits confirmed; URL pattern https://hal.science/<halId>): hal-05693116 Galaxy + France = ❤️ · hal-05685741 FAIRyMAGs · hal-05693236 Microbiology Galaxy Lab · hal-05693206 CoDex · hal-05699789 Biodiversity Genomics Galaxy Lab · hal-05694938 Galaxy-BioProd · hal-05680506 W4M boat · hal-05682190 Small Scale Admins · hal-05630495 Synthetic Biology in Galaxy · hal-05713233 Experimental protocols / FAIR · hal-05688981 sncRNA workflow suites · hal-05677408 OSUG Galaxy customisation · hal-05646530 First-time Galaxy tool integration

F1000Research — mirrors of the French deposits: slides 15-1124 (Galaxy + France = ❤️, Batut B, Galaxy France Working Group, Le Corguillé G, Bretaudeau A); posters 15-1114 (Microbiology Galaxy Lab), 15-1115 (CoDex), 15-1166 (Biodiversity Genomics Galaxy Lab), 15-1175 (Galaxy-BioProd). Note: f1000research.com returns HTTP 403 to automated fetchers; use a browser.

Zenodo — ad-hoc, with no GCC2026 community (a q=GCC2026 API search returns zero): record 21128145 (FAIRyMAGs) and 10.5281/zenodo.21133087 (AI/ML tools in Galaxy).

Sources