Getting deep into the weeds of Cannabis genomics: Join our first Cassyni Seminar
Reaching new highs in Cannabis sativa Omics
There is a growing interest in Cannabis (Cannabis sativa) research, and recent changes in regulations have spurred numerous genomic studies of this once-prohibited plant. Industrial hemp and medical marijuana are now global multibillion-dollar industries, but due to its widespread prohibition in the 20th and early 21st century it has missed out on many technological advances in molecular breeding that have greatly benefited the improvement of traditional crops. A wealth of sequencing data has started to be generated (including this high-quality medicinal cannabis reference published in GigaByte) but there is a need for genomics and bioinformatics portals to assist the access and analysis of the growing amounts of genotyping data from diverse accessions. These platforms aiding less-bioinformatics savvy plant breeders through the discovery of alleles for important traits, but have currently been absent for cannabis.
The International Cannabis Genome Research Consortium (ICGRC) has taken up the task of providing an authoritative source of rigorous and peer-reviewed scientific information relating to Cannabis genetics, genomics and phenotyping. Just out in GigaByte are new papers presenting two of these outputs: the CannSeek database bringing together the many genomics datasets; and a community-driven ICGRC bioinformatics platform to facilitate Cannabis multi-omics research. The papers promoting these resources, providing details on how to use them, and most importantly providing insight into how they were put together. Including protocols (handily hosted in our favourite protocols.io platform) providing detailed information for others to set up similar platforms, especially for crops like Cannabis where only sequence datasets are readily available.
Budding new forms of Science Communication
GigaByte has tried to make this information as accessible as possible with embedded protocols and interactive figures (check out 
figure 9 of the CannSeek paper), but to provide even more insight we are teaming up with Cassyni Science Communication Seminars to host an online seminar with the authors of these papers. Providing an opportunity to get firsthand insight from the authors on why these platforms are important, how you can use them, and the technical details on how they were developed. Also providing an opportunity to ask questions to them directly, both during the live talk, and asynchronously before and after the talk using Cassyni’s Q&A functionality. We’ve talked previously of our aims to think and act wider in Open Science, our next 10-year goal to better address the UNESCO Open Science Recommendation. Particularly the key pillars of “Open Engagement of Societal Actors” and “Open Dialogue with other Knowledge systems” where we need to improve the inclusiveness and accessibility of our research by communicating it to a much wider audience.
With these appeals for wider dialogue in science we’ve experimented with video abstracts in our GigaTV youtube channel, and taking this a step further we’ve now teamed up with Cassyni, a platform that helps academics discover and disseminate scholarly research through more discursive and interactive virtual seminars. Helping simplify the process of scheduling and running academic seminars, and publishing all the resulting talks with a DOI to make them citeable and part of the world’s largest freely accessible and fully searchable research seminar library.
Join us on 24th October at 10pm AEDT/12 noon BST/1pm CEST/7am ET for this first seminar, or watch the recording of the talk afterwards here and on our Cassyni page. First author Locedie Mansueto from Southern Cross University in Australia will be presenting on both of these papers, and then participate in a Q&A to answer any questions on how to use and reproduce these resources. Follow the Gigascience Press Seminar Series page for news on future seminars and talks.
References
Braich S et al., A new and improved genome sequence of Cannabis sativa, Gigabyte, 2020 https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.10
Mansueto L et al., CannSeek? Yes we Can! An open-source single nucleotide polymorphism database and analysis portal for Cannabis sativa, GigaByte, 2024 https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.135
Mansueto L et al., Building a community-driven bioinformatics platform to facilitate Cannabis sativa multi-omics research,GigaByte,2024 https://doi.org/10.46471/gigabyte.137
