Our lab is looking for a PhD student interested in the molecular mechanisms of operant self-learning, a form of motor learning.

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.

What would it take to make a completely new gene? Interesting question, but first let's agree on roughly what we mean by a "new gene." Here is how I defined the topic when discussing unique human attributes: "Creation of Eve." Was she completely new? So you see we mean something a lot more "new" than, for example, the human-specific version of the FoxP2 gene, which I have discussed before. And we mean something that is born overnight.

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.

We humans think we're pretty special. Here's Hamlet, in the speech that gave this blog its name: Kemble in the role of Hamlet. Courtesy of Wellcome Images.

A high coverage, high quality genome sequence of the butterfly Bicyclus anynana is published today in GigaScience . B. anynana , the squinting bush brown, is a fascinating model species that can modify its morphology in response to environmental clues.

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 different Passiflora species.

Should you cite preprints in your papers and should journals allow this? This is a topic that gets debated periodically. The most recent round of Twitter debate started last week when Martin Hunt pointed out that the journal Nucleic Acids Research wouldn’t allow him to cite them. A couple of days later I suggested that journals that don’t allow citing preprints are putting their authors’ at risk by forcing them not to cite relevant work.

While the Guardians of the Galaxy film franchise has just released its second film, the GigaScience Galaxy series has just published its 10 ^th , 11 ^th and 12 ^th papers.

The Weecology lab group run by Ethan White and Morgan Ernest at the University of Florida is seeking a Data Analyst to work collaboratively with faculty, graduate students, and postdocs to understand and model ecological systems. We’re looking for someone who enjoys tidying, managing, manipulating, visualizing, and analyzing data to help support scientific discovery.