Few countries have a biodiversity that’s comparable to Brazil’s, including plant-based food sources that are little known elsewhere.  Even in big cities you may pick all kinds of fruit directly from the tree, which can be both tasty and also interesting for the botanist. The Citizen Science project “Pomar Urbano” collects data on urban fruit-bearing plant in Brazilian cities.

The Washington DC Walter E. Washington Convention Center was the venue for the recent Cell Bio 2022 Meeting that took place on 3-7 December 2022.  Cell Bio 2022, the joint meeting of the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) and European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), is the largest yearly gathering for the Cell Biology community.

Citizen Scientists collect and share enormous amounts of data on invasive mosquitoes from the Mosquito Alert project as part of our GBIF and WHO-supported series on vector-borne diseases. Just out in GigaByte is the latest data release from Mosquito Alert, a citizen science system for investigating and managing disease-carrying mosquitoes, and is part of our WHO-sponsored series on vector borne human diseases.

In the data driven era, not only in research but in our day-to-day lives, people are creating more and more personal digitized data that enables human-participant research in social sciences and personalized medicine. However, with numerous data streams and types this raises concerns such as how to merge and share such data, as well as ethical problems.

Citizen Science at UNEA4 As GigaScience has the aim of opening and democratising science as far as it can go, we even work towards the involvement of non-professional “citizen scientists” in the scientific process.

GigaScience utilizes and promotes Open Science in all its forms, and one of the key areas in this ecosystem is Citizen Science – opening and democratising science to such an extent it is powered by public participation.

Despite the precipitous drop in the price of DNA sequencing, global credit crunches have tightened the science budgets able to properly take advantage of the potential of genomics. While this plummet in cost has led to an explosion of “mega-sequencing” projects carried out by large international consortia, it has also democratized and empowered what can be done outside traditional academia and research funding environments.

All Cats (Microbiomes) are Grey? Regular readers will have seen our interest in “community genome” projects, supported by crowdfunding and alternative means (fashion shows in case of the “peoples parrot”), and we’ve been pleased to see the Azolla fern and Cactus genome projects that we published guest GigaBlog postings from both achieve their funding targets.

Following our efforts encouraging open-science projects, such as the community funded “Peoples Parrot” and OpenAshDieback, today we have a guest posting from Fay-Wei Li and Kathleen Pryer from the Department of Biology at Duke University covering a crowdfunding effort to sequence the Azolla genome.