Latest posts
Opening peer-review: our new paper on SOAPdenovo2 shows how it works
Scott Edmunds - December 27, 2012
With everyone in a reflective mood as the year comes to a close, one of the big scientific trends of 2012 has obviously been the high profile that open-access and more open methods of carrying out science has received. With the Elsevier boycott, UK Finch report, and launch of a number of innovative new schemes […]
Promoting Data Citation in Nature (and Pushing Past Panda Problems)
Scott Edmunds - December 21, 2012
Regular reader of this blog will be aware of our efforts to promote data citation using digital object identifiers (DOIs), and this week, alongside Rebecca Lawrence from F1000 Research and Kevin Ashley from the Digital Curation Centre, our Editor in Chief Laurie Goodman has a correspondence in Nature strongly making this case. The motivation to […]
GigaScience special session at ISCB-Asia on Workflows & Cloud for Reproducible Bioinformatics
Scott Edmunds - December 16, 2012
GigaScience organised a session last week at the ISCB-Asia/SCCG conference in Shenzhen on “Workflows and Cloud for Reproducible Bioinformatics”.
This little piggy had a genome
Scott Edmunds - November 15, 2012
New research in GigaScience on the genome of the Wuzhishan minipig The availability of a high quality reference genome sequence for a species is extremely important in the deeper understanding of its biology, evolution, and comparative genomics. Many important model and commercially significant organisms have been sequenced to date, and today marks the publication of […]
First methylated nematode genome and other new datasets in GigaDB
Scott Edmunds - October 17, 2012
The worm that turned (epigenetics) GigaDB, GigaScience’s associated database, has had a number of new datasets just added, many for data types previously not hosted. Today marks the publication of new research in our sister BMC journal Genome Biology shaking up the epigenetics field by shattering the assumption that DNA methylation is absent in nematodes. […]
Big-science goes local: democratization of sequencing demonstrated by the parrot genome
Scott Edmunds - September 28, 2012
A Grassroots Funding effort in Puerto Rico enables genome sequencing of the critically endangered Puerto Rican parrot The rationale and scope for GigaScience has been to cover and provide a home for the growing number of studies producing and handling large-scale biological data, and this “big-data” data bonanza is not just due to well funded […]
ECCB 2012: Bioinformatics with a Swiss Flavour
Scott Edmunds - September 12, 2012
In the midst of a busy few weeks of European meetings, GigaScience is currently in Basel, where ECCB 2012 (the European Conference of Computational Biology) has just ended. Usually overshadowed by its bigger sibling: the ISMB (particularly when both meetings are in Europe and co-hosted), this was the first time that I had attended the […]
Hello, Goodbye: new changes to the GigaScience team
Scott Edmunds - September 5, 2012
As we enter a new month, we have to announce some personnel changes to GigaScience, as we welcome Nicole Nogoy to the team as a Commissioning Editor from her base in New Zealand. It is with sadness we also have to say goodbye to our Assistant Editor Alexandra Basford, who has just left us to […]
New paper in GigaScience: sequencing and the single-cell
Scott Edmunds - August 16, 2012
The precipitous drop in the price of next generation sequencing coupled with its increasing sensitivity has opened up whole new areas of research, one of the most interesting in recent years being the advent of single-cell sequencing. Combining advances in flow-sorting of cells, whole genome amplification and the latest sequencing technologies is now allowing researchers […]
Enabling bioinformatics tools to smoke the peace pipe together
Scott Edmunds - August 6, 2012
Scientific workflow software such as Taverna, Knime and Pipeline Pilot can overcome interoperability issues relating to the access of tools and data format conversions. Such tasks are automatically handled by the data processing pipeline during its enactment by the workflow software. Galaxy is another workflow system, and its annual conference was held last month at […]