MicroCT imaging is an exceptional tool for 3D visualisation. A new Data Note published in GigaScience reports on a unique, high-quality series of MicroCT images that covers the lifespan of an amphibian from tadpole to froglet to mature adult frog.

Evolution is easier than we think, and one great way to see why is to look at what we know about protein evolution. Proteins have been evolving on our planet for about 4 billion years. Their appearance almost certainly precedes the beginning of life itself. We still don't know how the whole thing got off the ground, but once the stage was set (in living cells), evolution began exploring Protein Space.

Welcome back to our next installment of: what the heck is happening with the Portal rodents? For those just tuning in, I might recommend reading our first two installments: Regime Shift Cometh? and Regime Shift Still Cometh? June in the Arizona desert can be a brutal time for conducting the Portal rodent trip.

GigaScience Press would like to congratulate Victoire Nsabatien for winning a 2024 Ben Barres Spotlight Award for his two preprints publicly reviewed and published by GigaByte. Prizes are a good way of positively reinforcing and incentivizing good practice in opening up science, and eLife should be commended creating the Ben Barres Spotlight Award for groups that are underrepresented in biology and medicine.

FUNC on Safari: Functional Metagenomics conference 2024 at Skukuza, Kruger National Park, South Africa (2nd – 5th June 2024) FMG24 participants group photo, taken outside the conference centre at Skukuza rest camp.

Plant phenotyping – the science of gathering precise information and measurements on plants – has seen massive improvements recently, and the combination of sensor technology and AI methods will continue to change the way crops are assessed and improved. A new article in GigaScience demonstrates where this is going: Jonas Bömer and colleagues at the Institute of Sugar Beet Research (Göttingen) used

The 8th World Congress on Research Integrity (WCRI) took place in Athens, Greece from 1st-5th June. GigaScience Press are regular attendees of this conference, and this year our organisation was represented by GigaScience Editor-in-Chief Scott Edmunds, Executive Editor Nicole Nogoy, and Data Scientist Chris Armit.

As an Open Science publisher we’ve pushed for transparency and access in the research that we disseminate, and in GigaByte journal we’ve just published a new open-source software tool “GetFreeCopy” that is demonstrative and addresses many features of this. To tell us more we have a Q&A with lead author Kuan-lin Huang, an Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomics &

Today we publish a new Data Release presenting a dataset of jellyfish sightings collected by citizen scientists from 2021 through 2023 within Hong Kong waters. This is the first example where our curation team have worked with a Citizen Science project to share their observations in the GBIF biodiversity database.

Back when I had optimistic views of my time, I vowed to do more blogging this year. Sadly, life had other plans. But I return with an update to an earlier post on the Portal rodent community. To recap, in April 2023, my student Pat Dumandan and I were afraid. Afraid that Chaetodipus penicillatus (the Desert pocket mouse) was about to undergo a population explosion.