Latest posts
A GigaGathering at ICG8 in the era of big data and crowdsourcing
Nicole Nogoy - November 5, 2013
As the GigaScience journal moves from strength-to-strength, with that comes the expansion of the editorial and data management teams that are now spanning three continents – and what better way to meet than at the 8th International Conference on Genomics (ICG8) in Shenzhen, China, co-organised by the BGI and GigaScience. Held at the Thunderbirdsesque Vanke […]
Release the Bats! New Halloween #opendata treat in GigaDB
Scott Edmunds - October 31, 2013
) As big proponents of Open Data, on top of the many diverse datasets associated with GigaScience papers in our integrated GigaDB database, we are continuing to fill it with datasets produced by our BGI hosts. As a special Halloween treat, today we’ve added three bat genomes to the database: Brandt’s bat (Myotis brandtii), the […]
The cyber-centipede: giving online species descriptions a leg up
Scott Edmunds - October 28, 2013
The rate of species extinction has lent increasing urgency to the description of new species, but in this supposedly networked “big data” era the process of cataloging the rich tapestry of life has changed little since the time of Linnaeus. Fortunately, this process is finally being dragged into the 21st century, as the procedure of […]
Open Data For The Win!
Scott Edmunds - October 2, 2013
Depositing data in GigaDB helps authors win BMC Open Data Award by boosting confidence in unexpected research findings Last night at the Beyond the Genome conference in San Francisco, researchers were presented with this year’s BioMed Central Open Data Award for their work demonstrating that DNA methylation occurs in the parasitic worm Trichinella spiralis, a […]
Extended Q&A with Assemblathon2 Author Keith Bradnam
Scott Edmunds - August 20, 2013
A lot has already been written about last months Assemblathon2 paper in GigaScience (see the growing list of articles here), but for the box-set completists interested in squeezing every last bit of insight into the project and how it was put together, there was a lot of additional material left over from the recent Biome […]
Save the trees. Play facebook games.
Scott Edmunds - August 13, 2013
Gamers to join ash dieback fight-back Next time you sit next to someone on the train playing a game on their smartphone don’t be too dismissive. They may be harnessing the most state of the art genomics technology in the fight to save Northern Europe’s woodlands from destruction. We are obviously not talking about Candy […]
More on our ISMB workshop: What Bioinformaticians need to know about digital publishing beyond the PDF
Scott Edmunds - August 9, 2013
Big Data Publishing (credit Jenny Cham, CC-BY) As mentioned in our previous posting, on top of the many great talks and sessions we attended at ISMB in Berlin last month, we were kept even busy helping to organize and present in a special Beyond-the-PDF inspired “What Bioinformaticians need to know about digital publishing beyond the […]
Bioinformaticians breaking down barriers in Berlin
Scott Edmunds - August 1, 2013
Open Science flourishes at BOSC and ISMB It’s been a busy couple of weeks for GigaScience, with our 1st birthday, publication of a special anniversary print issue sponsored by Aspera, and publication of the (unusually reviewed) Assemblathon2 paper. These all spanned and were coordinated with the ISMB meeting in Berlin, the yearly gathering of the […]
Genome assembly in the spotlight
Scott Edmunds - July 25, 2013
Biggest ever contest to put genome assemblers through their paces If you haven’t caught it yet, the largest systematic assessment the process of genome assembly carried out to date has been published this week in GigaScience. The second Assemblathon competition saw 21 teams submit 43 entries based on data from three different unassembled parrot, cichlid […]
GigaBirthday at ISMB
Scott Edmunds - July 19, 2013
GigaScience reaches its first anniversary of publication, and achieves several milestones in changing how life science research is published One year on from our launch, we are unveiling new features and functionality at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting at the ICC in Berlin (pictured) this week. As well as a print issue […]