Latest posts

As those of you who have been paying attention well know, I am currently attending this year’s International Conference on Systems Biology (#ICSB) meeting in either Heidelberg or Mannheim (there’s ongoing debate about the meeting locale). The meeting opened yesterday with a plenary talk by Jean Peccoud talking about DNA “grammar,” making linguistic models of […]

Continue reading

Working at a data center as big as the BGI, and launching a journal focused on maximizing data use, we have followed the many calls over the years for improved incentives and methods to aid and reward scientists in spending the considerable time and effort to share their data. The Datacite consortium has been key […]

Continue reading

Our busy summer on the road continues, with further globetrotting to meet authors and collaborators, get the message about GigaScience out, and hopefully at the end of it get some papers. This week Laurie and Scott will be at the Datacite meeting in Berkeley, meeting the people helping us to produce our data-DOIs, learning about […]

Continue reading

After last months website launch, and work progressing on our associated GigaScience database (including the addition of further datasets, such as the recently published Chinese Hamster Ovary cell-line genome) our next priority is the more traditional job of an editor: papers, papers papers. The journal has had some great feedback on twitter, on many blogs, […]

Continue reading

Last week marked two important milestones in the deadly 2011 European E. coli 0104:H4 outbreak: the Robert Koch institute announcing the end of the outbreak, and the publication of several papers from the many groups sequencing the pathogen. This included a publication in the New England Journal of Medicine by groups from the BGI, UMC […]

Continue reading

I just got back from attending the IBRO World Congress in Florence and the CNS*2011 meeting in Stockholm.  All I can say is: lucky me. Okay, clearly that’s not all I can say.  They were both wonderful meetings and it was great to see so much good neuroscience going on.  IBRO had quite the turnout […]

Continue reading

So that’s ISMB over for another year. The worlds computational biologists are now sleeping off their Austrian wine and Sacher Torte hangovers on flights back home, hopefully inspired and brimming with fresh ideas for the next year. On the whole it seemed a productive and positive meeting, and whilst personal perspectives always differ depending on […]

Continue reading

In this era of “big-data” and supposed data-tsunamis, being able to sift through the vast swathes of information and find what you are looking will become more and more important. Key to this process will be the use of controlled vocabularies and ontologies – properly tagging and labelling the data to make it findable, and […]

Continue reading

After the launch of the GigScience website last week, and a call for papers this week, it’s now time to start  meeting and talking with potential authors. After a busy batch of conferences hosted by the BGI, including the  first meeting of the Earth Microbiome Project (see the slides and video of our talk) and […]

Continue reading

As biological data is now produced faster than it can easily be handled and stored, the dissemination of this data has become a major bottleneck. GigaScience: a new type of journal from BioMed Central and BGI — no stranger to these issues being the world’s largest Genomics center — starts taking submissions today with the […]

Continue reading