I run a Masters module called MD997. Over six weeks, students have to write a grant proposal and then assess their peers’ proposals at a mock grant panel. Each student bases their proposal on a paper. They present that paper to the class and then they write their proposal using the paper as a springboard. I refreshed my paper list this year to consist of solely papers published (or posted on bioRxiv) in 2019. The previous list is here.

We have a new preprint out – it is a cautionary tale about using GFP nanobodies in cells. This short post gives a bit of background to the work. Please read the paper if you are interested in using GFP nanobodies in cells, you can find it here. Paper in a nutshell: Caution is needed when using GFP nanobodies because they can inhibit their target protein in cells.

This week Erick Martins Ratamero and I put up a preprint on vesicle packing. This post is a bit of backstory but please take a look at the paper, it’s very short and simple. The paper started when I wanted to know how many receptors could fit in a clathrin-coated vesicle. Sounds like a simple problem – but it’s actually more complicated.

I've put a short note up on bioRxiv about ways to geocode nucleotide sequences in databases such as GenBank. The preprint is "Geocoding genomic databases using GBIF" https://doi.org/10.1101/469650.

[From July 2018, the Europe PMC repository will start indexing preprints. Making preprints discoverable through Europe PMC will make the science reported in preprints more widely discoverable and support their inclusion into workflows such as grant reporting, article citing and credit and attribution.

Open Science Trek, The Next Integration Fostering and promoting more open and transparent science is one of the goals of GigaScience , and to do this we have been big promoters of open peer review as well as preprints servers. Combining both of these, Academic Karma was the one of the first platforms to focus on open review of preprints, and has helped facilitate this over the past 3 years.

The year is almost over and it’s time to review the highlights of GigaScience ’s 2017. “Draft genome of the reindeer (Rangifer tarandus)”Foto: Alexandre Buisse CC-BY-SA 3.0 2017 was as special year for GigaScience : a year of many firsts and we celebrated our 5th birthday! An occasion to look back – and forward, as we did in our anniversary editorial.

Last month was the 7th consecutive year we’ve attended our co-publisher BGI’s annual ICG (International Conference on Genomics) gathering in Shenzhen.

Call for Submissions – Win Prizes and Join us in Shenzhen for ICG-12 Being co-published by BGI and based at their Hong Kong office we are regular participants at their yearly ICG (International Conference on Genomics) conference in Shenzhen. Since the very first meeting in 2006, ICG has grown to become one of the most influential annual meetings in ‘omics’ research, and is now in its 12th edition.

Authors can now submit their bioRxiv preprints directly to GigaScience via the biorXiv platform, at the push of a button. This handy technical integration is another hallmark of biology preprints becoming a normal, accepted, and speedy way of communicating research results. Pre-prints, versions of a scholarly paper that precede formal publication in a peer-reviewed journal are  becoming increasingly mainstream.