Last week, from October 30th to November 3rd, ELIXIR organized the BioHackathon Europe in Barcelona, drawing international participants, including Timo Mühlhaus, Jonathan Bauer, Lukas Weil, Xiaoran Zhou, and Björn Grüning from the DataPLANT team. The event fostered collaboration, discussions, and shared experiences among 150 participants from across Europe and even Australia.

Genome Annotation and Post-Assembly Workflows for the Tree of Life
One standout project focused on assessing the performance of various Genome Annotation tools and workflows for diverse organisms, including Human chromosome 19 (HG38), Drosophila melanogaster, Sponge (Phakellia ventilabrum), Butterfly (Helleie helle), Shamrock (Trifolium dubium), Snail (Melampus), and Coral (Pocillopora meandrina). Utilizing tools such as Braker3, Maker, Busco, Funannotate, Helixer, RepeatModeller, Eggnog, InterproScan, and integrating annotations into a shareable JBrowse instance, the team addressed the evolving needs, incorporating RepeatExplorer into Galaxy.

Increasing Galaxy Tool Visibility for Specialized Scientific Communities
Another noteworthy project led by Galaxy aimed at enhancing the findability, visibility, and impact of Galaxy tools for specialized scientific communities. Collaborating with Nicola Soranzo and Johan Gustafsson, the team, including online participant Bérénice and support from Matúš Kalaš, successfully implemented a pipeline. This pipeline collects Galaxy tool wrappers, incorporates metadata from various sources, and filters tools for specific Galaxy communities, contributing to the broader accessibility and impact of Galaxy tools.

The BioHackathon Europe exemplified the spirit of cross-country and cross-project collaboration and innovation in the bioinformatics community, pushing the boundaries of genome annotation and bioinformatics tool development for the benefit of scientific research worldwide.
The mentioned tools are made available to the DataPLANT community through the Galaxy workflow integration.