The SAMtools suite of tools for manipulating sequencing data one of the most ubiquitous tools in bioinformatics, as the “glue” holding together much of bioinformatics we see it used in pretty much every genomics pipeline we are submitted.

The International Ukraine Genetic Diversity Project finds a quarter of the genetic variation in Europe, dramatically increasing information on population diversity and medical genetic variation. Today, the largest study of genetic diversity in Ukraine was published in GigaScience . The project was an international effort, bringing together researchers in Ukraine, the US and China and is the first fruits of this collaboration to

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.

For a few years now I have been arguing that in order to accomplish change in scholarly infrastructure, it likely is an inefficient plan by funding agencies to mandate the least powerful players in the game, authors (i.e., their grant recipients). The legacy publishing system still exists because institutions pay for its components, publishers.

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.

Looking back at this unusual COVID-dominated year, we are happy to report that GigaScience not only kept going under difficult circumstances, publishing outstanding examples of Big Data science and introducing innovations in the review process.

There has been some outrage at the announcement that Nature is following through with their 2004 declaration of charging ~10k ($/€) in article processing charges (APCs). However, not only have these charges been 16 years in the making but the original declaration was made not on some obscure blog, but at a UK parliamentary inquiry. So nobody could rightfully claim that we couldn’t have seen this development coming from miles away.

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.

Last week, there was a lot of outrage at the announcement of Nature’s new pricing options for their open access articles. People took to twitter to voice their, ahem, concern. Some examples: There are many more that all express their outrage at the gall of Nature to charge their authors these sums,. even Forbes interviewed some of them.

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.