Latest posts
Jack Rabbits, Lizards and Squirrels, Oh My! Q&A with Taylor Noble
Nicole Nogoy - September 29, 2016
Here is a Q&A with the first author of our first camera trap dataset published in our Data-Intensive Ecology series. Taylor shares his thoughts on why he’s so interested in the endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the usefulness of camera traps in ecology, as well as challenges with big data.
Guest posting: Conda as a new standard for Galaxy tool dependencies
Scott Edmunds - September 20, 2016
The Galaxy community is one that shares similar reproducibility goals with GigaScience, having a computational platform that allows users to share workflows, histories and wrapped computational tools in an easy-to-use and open source interface. Björn Grüning and The Intergalactic Utilities Commission of Galaxy have a guest posting here to announce new changes that will make development and presentation of tools and pipelines through Galaxy even more reproducible and usable.
Of big fish and small genomes. Ocean sunfish shines.
Scott Edmunds - September 12, 2016
The genome of the ocean sunfish (Mola mola), the world’s largest bony fish, has been just been published in GigaScience by researchers at A*STAR, Singapore, and China National Genebank. Here we talk to the researchers, including Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner, on how the project came together, the slightly unusual sample collection, and how hope this work helps to provide insight into the fish’s extraordinary growth rate and unique body shape.
Apple 2.0. A delicious genome.
Hans Zauner - August 10, 2016
The latest apple launch event is not for a new mobile phone or tablet, but in this case a new, much improved reference genome. Just published is a new “long-read” golden delicious genome, and Hans Zauner (the latest addition to the GigaScience team) explains why it is important.
Guest posting: Building a PhenoMeNal metabolomics e-infrastructure
Scott Edmunds - July 19, 2016
David Johnson and the PhenoMeNal consortium have a guest posting on their efforts in building an open, community-supported, e-infrastructure for medical metabolomics data, and how they are seeking community feedback on the requirements for the data infrastructures needed.
#ISMB16: A Disney Coming of Age Tale.
Scott Edmunds - July 15, 2016
At Disney World infancy ends at 3, or at least that is the age children have to start purchasing tickets. It seemed appropriate to celebrate our 4th birthday there. Or at least at the #ISMB16 Computational Biology meeting that was held this week at the Walt Disney World Resort. Here we report on what happened and how we and the field have been growing up
Open bioinformatics in the house of the mouse.
Scott Edmunds - July 10, 2016
The 2016 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference has just finished here at Disney World Orlando, and here is the write up of the meeting, with discussion on the merits of open bioinformatics and closed cartoons.
The lowest common denominator: marketing science with jIF
Scott Edmunds - July 8, 2016
Our Editor in Chief Laurie Goodman gives her thoughts on the journal impact factor (jIF), and how we need to move beyond shallow, untransparent, gameable, out-of-date proxies that promote bad scientific practices.
Decoding The Tree of Life: Olive joins the Genome Club
Scott Edmunds - June 28, 2016
Teams of scientists from Spain have published the first complete genome of the olive tree. The specimen sequenced is of the Spanish Farga variety, and is over 1,200 years old. This work will facilitate genetic improvement for production of olives and olive oil, two key products in the Mediterranean economy and diet.
Of Parasites & Protocols, Part 3. Author Q&A with Tony Papenfuss
Scott Edmunds - June 16, 2016
Following our announcement this month of a new collaboration and integration with protocols.io, we’ve gone into more detail on the first two papers that have utilised this open access repository of scientific methods and collaborative protocol-centered platform. To give some insight into his work, we have one of our author Q&As with Associate Professor Tony Papenfuss, lead author of our scabies genome paper.