Tag Archives: open data
Research Parasites Wanted. Q&A with Casey Greene & Brian Byrd
Scott Edmunds - September 14, 2017
As a journal focussed on open science we are big promoters of research parasites (and research on parasites), and try to feeds them with open data and tools. It is therefore appropriate this is the second year GigaScience has supported and sponsored the Research Parasite awards. In one of our Q&As, organisers Casey Greene and […]
Bohemian Bashfully. Baroque birthdays and bingo in Prague.
Scott Edmunds - July 31, 2017
Every summer we celebrate our birthday at the ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, and this was a particularly memorable and important one – being the 5th birthday of GigaScience, and 25th edition of the ISMB. Having ISMB in Prague this year, the historic capital of old Bohemia was particularly appreciated by the attendees, […]
A Passion for Morphing Passiflora Leaves: Author Q&A with Daniel Chitwood
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 […]
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.
Remember Remember, It’s Neuro-November!
Nicole Nogoy - November 1, 2016
Halloween may be over, but this November GigaScience will be continuing to fight the zombie (paper) apocalypse and binge on sweet sweet brains (research outputs).
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.
#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.