Tag Archives: genomics
Bringing Wildlife Forensics into the Omics Era. Q&A with Alfred Arulandhu and Martijn Staats
Scott Edmunds - September 12, 2017
Sequencers versus the smugglers. CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), is one of the largest and oldest conservation and sustainable use agreements in existence, and provides a legal framework for protecting endangered plants and animals around the world. There are roughly 35,000 species listed on the three […]
Guest Blog from Huanming Yang on using the human genome for big-data storage
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 […]
Data Intensive Software Publishing & Sailing The Code Ocean. Q&A With Ruibang Luo.
Scott Edmunds - June 27, 2017
GigaScience is always trying to push the boundaries of how we disseminate reproducible research, and to adapt to the challenges of dealing with experiments become more data-intensive. We now showcase a new reproducible research platform we’ve been testing called Code Ocean, and have a Q&A with our Author Ruibang Luo on his experiences using it. […]
Getting the Buzz on Bee Parasites. Author Q&A with Tatsuhiko Kadowaki
Scott Edmunds - February 24, 2017
The decline of global honeybee populations are a major environment concern, because of their vital role in our food systems and pollination of flowering plants. Twenty first century ‘Omics is coming to the rescue, and published in GigaScience this week is an article that presents the genome and proteome of a mahor threat to bee […]
2016: An Eventful Year for GigaScience
Nicole Nogoy - December 13, 2016
This year has been an eventful one, probably too eventful for many. For GigaScience it has been eventful too, although fortunately in a much more positive way than many have experienced. While there are fears of us entering a “post-truth” era, there is more need than ever for our role as promoters of transparency, reproducibility and providers of cold-hard data. We celebrated our birthday with Mickey Mouse, and experienced many other milestones. On the technical front, this year we have brought you better integration with citable and updatable methods, bigger better and broader data types, and much more. In the tradition of end-of-year-introspection, here is a summary of some of our 2016 achievements as we continue to push the boundaries of innovative publishing of all research objects and reproducible research.
Ginkgo genome fills an evolutionary hole
Scott Edmunds - November 25, 2016
New in GigaScience is an article that presents the genome sequence of Ginkgo biloba, the oldest extant tree species. The research was carried out by a team of scientists at BGI, Zheijiang University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who tackled and analyzed an exceptionally large genome, totalling more than 10Gb. Ginkgo is considered by some as a “living fossil”, its form and structure having changed very little in 270 million years. Its unique position in the evolutionary tree of life means the ginkgo genome will provide an extensive resource for studying early events in tree development and evolution.
Personal Genomics Enters a New Phase
Scott Edmunds - October 11, 2016
Individual human genomes are diploid in nature, with half of the homologous chromosomes derived from each parent. The context in which variations occur on each individual chromosome has profound effects on the action and clinical importance of the genes on it, but this “haplotype” information has been mostly ignored in genomics research to date. A wealth of new data released from the Personal Genome Project via a new Data Note helps fill this gap by releasing the largest set of high coverage whole human genome assemblies with experimentally determined haplotypes to date.
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.
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.