Endorsing Data Citation Nicely timed for the Data Citation Principles workshop at the IDCC meeting in San Francisco yesterday, the finalized Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles has just been posted on the Force11 website.
As big proponents of Open Data, on top of the many diverse datasets associated with GigaScience papers in our integrated GigaDB database, we are continuing to fill it with datasets produced by our BGI hosts.
New research in GigaScience on the genome of the Wuzhishan minipig The availability of a high quality reference genome sequence for a species is extremely important in the deeper understanding of its biology, evolution, and comparative genomics.
A correspondence we have contributed to has just been published in the BMC Research Notes “Data standardization, sharing and publication series” on the adventures in data-citation and data-release practices surrounding the Sorghum genome that is available in our GigaDB database and that was published last year in Genome Biology . We use Sorghum as an example to highlight the issues surrounding data release and use strong words,
Another incremental step has been achieved for the adoption of the practice of data citation; this week, Nature Biotechnology has included one of our dataset DOIs in their references for the first time.
Genetic hitchhiking is thought to be an inevitable result of strong positive selection in a population. The basic idea is that if a particular gene is strongly selected for (as opposed to selected against), then the chunk of the genome that carries that gene will become very common in the population.
The next post will discuss recent evidence for genetic hitchhiking in humans. So, what do we mean when we say that genes can hitchhike? To make sense of this phenomenon, we first need to review chromosomes and sexual reproduction. Most people know that sexual reproduction creates offspring that are genetically distinct from both of the their parents.
Age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is a leading cause of blindness in humans, and the leading cause of visual impairment during advanced age. The condition comes in two basic forms, the most severe of which is untreatable.
Defenders of intelligent design theory often dwell on the topic of "junk DNA," which has been molded into a masterpiece of folk science. The ID approach to "junk DNA" involves a fictional story about "Darwinism" discouraging its study, and a contorted and simplistic picture of a "debate" about whether "junk DNA" has "function." The fictional story is ubiquitous despite being repeatedly debunked.
So why is it that I and many other biologists hypothesize that introns are mostly non-functional? (I'll assume that you've read the previous posts, and that you understand what it is that I mean when I challenge claims that introns are functional elements in an information-rich genome.