Latest posts
Call for papers for a special GCC2013 Galaxy series
Scott Edmunds - April 5, 2013
The 2013 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2013) and GigaScience are today announcing a call for papers for a special thematic focused series on studies utilizing large-scale datasets and workflows. Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research allowing their growing community of users to reproduce and share analyses. GigaScience, with its aims to […]
Q&A with Xin Zhou, author of our insect “squishome” paper.
Scott Edmunds - April 2, 2013
Following from our previous blog posting, here we profile and interview Dr Xin Zhou, lead author of our recent “squishome” insect goo metabarcoding paper. This NGS (next generation sequencing)-based work has already generated a lot of interest (see this write-up in Wired and this blog posting for nice examples), and here Dr Zhou gives more […]
New in GigaScience: the Squishome
Scott Edmunds - March 27, 2013
Insect goo aids biodiversity research Apologies to Jonathan Eisen (see Badomics in the journal), but today in GigaScience we publish a new “squishomics” approach for assessing and understanding biodiversity, using the slightly wacky sounding method of combining DNA-soup made from crushed-up insects and the latest sequencing technology. This bulk-collected insect goo has the potential to […]
Tweenome on Film: Excellent Video on Crowdsourcing Killer Outbreaks
Scott Edmunds - February 21, 2013
The BBSRC has just released an excellent video and article on crowdsourcing killer disease outbreaks very relevant to our recent commentary and blog postings on the OpenAshDB (the Ash Dieback disease crowdsourcing) project. Featuring interviews from Nick Loman and Lisa Crossman (also an author on our OpenAshDB paper), key contributors to the 2011 E. coli […]
Open Science versus Ash Dieback (and the Tweenome revisited)
Scott Edmunds - February 13, 2013
Bye Bye Bluebells Bluebell woods, the dense carpets of violet–blue flowers found in ancient woodland are a spectacular and famous springtime sight in Britain, but this picture postcard scene is threatened as never before. Chalara fraxinea or ash dieback, a devastating fungal disease of ash trees has swept across northern Europe, and has now reached […]
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. […]