The first comprehensive mobile genome analysis application, iGenomics, is now available for download and use on an iOS smartphone . By pairing an smartphone with a handheld DNA sequencer, users will be able to create a mobile genetics laboratory, reminiscent of the Star Trek’s “tricorder”. Just published is an article presenting  iGenomics, the first DNA sequencing toolkit that can run on a smartphone.

Meetings In the Time of Coronavirus: Conferences go Viral June-July usually marks peak conference season when the GigaScience team is on the road, but with the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down travel and public gatherings it has been a strangely static summer.

It’s DNA day, celebrating two historic milestones: The publication of the structure of DNA in 1953, and the completion of the human genome project in 2003.

This week we showcased a new way of peer reviewing software, testing code in an independent manner and providing a CODECHECK “certificate of reproducible computation” when the results in the paper can be reproduced.

Out today in GigaScience is ShinyLearner, a new tool to make it easier to perform benchmark comparisons of classification algorithms. This tool stands out by making this process super systematic and reproducible, and despite needing to interface with many different libraries and languages it uses software containers (and a CodeOcean demo) so end users don’t need to worry about this complexity.

Stuck indoors and bored of passively reading information on the coronavirus (and more) when you could be doing something more constructive? GigaScience now has hypothes.is integration for collaborative annotation, and we would encourage readers to interact with our content more collaboratively.

In this data-driven era, research is faced with new challenges, from sharing, storing and accessing data, including how to better integrate data to answer big questions in science. With many data repositories available, it is hard to maintain them all – some repositories are forced to close – meaning loss of access to invaluable datasets.

At GigaScience as our focus is on reproducibility rather than subjective impact, it can be challenging at times to judge this in our papers. Targeting the “bleeding edge” of data-driven research, more and more of our papers utilise technologies, such as Jupyter notebooks, Virtual Machines, and Containers such as Docker.

The mock metagenome, MAGs and breaking the first rule of Long Read Club Nick showing us some of his experiments with an early antecedent Short Read Club… Out today in GigaScience is a new “mock metagenome” Data Note from the Nick Loman lab in Birmingham showcasing the latest long-read sequencing technologies from Oxford Nanopore.

The 12th International Biocuration Conference was held in Cambridge, UK from April 7-10th 2019. As regular participants of the meeting you can read our write-ups of the meeting going back to 2012. This is a forum for biocurators and developers to discuss their work and to promote collaboration.