This week in GigaScience we published the genome of the mediterranean cone snail, Lautoconus ventricosus . Cone snails produce a wide variety of powerful toxins and the new chromosome-scale genome assembly opens the door for detailed investigations of their diversity and evolution. Cone snails are beloved by collectors for their often beautiful shells, but they are infamous because of their powerful venom.

The dizzying complexity of biological systems necessitates an abundance of tools that allow researchers to understand the deluge of sequence, structural, and systems-level data that is being generated in cell, molecular, and developmental biology.

This week in GigaScience we published research revealing a previously hidden diversity of symbiotic bacteria from the genus Rickettsia , spanning a wide range of arthropod hosts. Using accidentally amplified sequence data from a barcoding database as a starting point, the results will help to better understand the co-evolution of these intimate symbioses.

Today is a big day for the genomics of egg-laying animals, with the coordinated publication of three papers on animal sex chromosome evolution and diversity in GigaScience , Nature , and Genome Research by the Qi Zhou lab at Zhejiang University.

Cell Bio 2020 Virtual – the online ASCB|EMBO Meeting – took place on 2-16 December 2020 and offered many invaluable insights on the structural and evolutionary basis of biological systems.

With the recent launch of our new GigaByte journal you may have noticed some interesting genome datasets being published, including the banjo frog, common dragonet fish, and extremely rare Nyssa yunnanensis tree. Joining these species on the genomics tree of life this month is a small mouse-like marsupial called the brown antechinus.

“Extinction is forever – so our action must be immediate.” – Sir David Attenborough, Sept 30 ^th 2020 Biodiversity Genomics 2020 aimed to bring together researchers across the world to celebrate the global achievement in genome sequencing in an effort to “sequence life for the future of life”. This was a virtual conference that took place on 5 ^th -9 ^th September 2020 and the GigaScienc e team

The data.table package enables high-performance extended functionality for data tables in R. treedata.table is a wrapperfor data.table for phylogenetic analyses that matches a phylogeny to the data.table, and preserves matching during data.table operations.Using the data.table package greatly increases analysis reproducibility and the efficiency of data manipulation operations over other ways of performing similar tasks inbase R, enabling

Bats are mammals like no other – airborne, mostly nocturnal, often hidden away in caves, capable of using echolocation for in-flight navigation. No two bat species are alike, however. Their diversity of morphology, life styles and feeding habits is staggering. New bat genomics research published today in GigaScience explores

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.