Nicole Nogoy - August 2, 2019
In this data-driven era, research is faced with new challenges, from sharing, storing and accessing data, including how to better integrate data to answer big questions in science. With many data repositories available, it is hard to maintain them all – some repositories are forced to close – meaning loss of access to invaluable datasets. […]
Nicole Nogoy - July 4, 2019
Three jellyfish genomes are better than one A new article in GigaScience might make you squirm if you plan to hit the beach this summer. The published work presents the draft genomes of three different jellyfish species. The international group of researchers, lead by Joseph Ryan (University of Florida), chose to examine jellyfish that present a […]
Nicole Nogoy - June 20, 2019
At GigaScience as our focus is on reproducibility rather than subjective impact, it can be challenging at times to judge this in our papers. Targeting the “bleeding edge” of data-driven research, more and more of our papers utilise technologies, such as Jupyter notebooks, Virtual Machines, and Containers such as Docker. Working these tools in to […]
Hans Zauner - April 25, 2019
It’s DNA day, commemorating the publication of the structure of DNA in 1953, as well as the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003. Genomics has come a long way since then. Today it is possible to sequence whole genomes with a very reasonable investment of time and money. What an amazing time for […]
Hans Zauner - November 28, 2018
Today in GigaScience we present the genome of the tegu lizard. It is the most complete assembly of any reptile genome so far and will also aid scientists to study other lizards and snakes. The tegu has mastered a trick that is highly unusual in the reptile world: it can turn on its own heating […]
Nicole Nogoy - July 17, 2018
With the upcoming 5th International Plant Phenotyping Symposium (IPPS) set to take place Oct 2-5, in Adelaide, Australia, we look at how the plant phenotyping community has progressed over the last decade and how we can potentially address the issues surrounding data sharing, re-use, and reproducible research. As we live in an increasingly data-driven era, […]
Scott Edmunds - September 7, 2017
With the current annual data creation rate estimated to be in the tens of zettabytes, the flood of information currently being generated in every area of human life is crashing up against limited data storage solutions. However, DNA, which serves as a storage system for biological information, has been proposed as a potential means to […]
Nicole Nogoy - May 4, 2017
Passiflora, commonly known as Passion Vines or Passion Flowers is a genus encompassing around 500 species, all of which exhibit such huge variation in leaf shape. To further understand the unique diversity of Passiflora leaves, a recent paper published in GigaScience, presents a morphometric analysis and unique open dataset encompassing over 3,300 leaves from 40 […]
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.
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.