Dr. David Matthews of the School of Cellular and Molecular Medicine approached Research IT concerning an urgent project.

Dr. Matthews, Professor Julian Hiscox at Liverpool University and Professor Miles Carroll of Public Health England are all part of European funded effort to sequence and follow the genetic development of the virus behind the West African ebola outbreak.

In order to analyse genetic sequences provided by Liverpool University, the researcher had arranged to run a number of tools on the high-performance cluster using the Galaxy biomedical research platform. The core of the analysis, however, required a tool that was not included in Galaxy.

Research IT worked with Dr. Matthews and the Advanced Computing Research Centre (ACRC) to integrate this tool into Galaxy, and also helped review and improve the researcher's own post-processing code.

This project has now been published in Nature, for more information see the news item.