Yesterday we published the winning paper of the second GigaScience prize, with additional detail and coverage in GigaBlog describing why we and the judging panel found it so novel. This was an impressively case study in reproducibility, reassembling & reannotating around 700 microbial eukaryotic transcriptomes to demonstrate this approach can aid in revealing new biologically relevant findings and missed genes from old data.

Out today is the winner of our ICG13 Prize, presenting work that can aid in revealing new biologically relevant findings and missed genes from previously generated transcriptome assemblies. Teaching old data new tricks, and maximising every last nugget of information from previously funded research.

Pressing Challenges for the Global Research Community Continuous growth of the world population is expected to double the worldwide demand for food by 2050. Eighty-eight percent of countries currently face a serious burden of malnutrition, especially in Africa and South-East Asia.

While they say one swallow doesn’t make a spring, one swallow genome makes a welcome contribution to the avian genome club. Taking advantage of the latest genomic and optical mapping technologies, a team of Scientists from the University of Milan, California State Polytechnic University and the University of Pavia, have carried out the high quality sequencing of the barn swallow genome, published today in Gigascience.

Over the last ten years, scientific funding agencies across the globe have implemented policies which force their grant recipients to behave in a compliant way. For instance, the NIH OA policy mandates that research articles describing research they funded must be available via PubMedCentral within 12 months of publication. Other funders and also some institutions have implemented various policies with similar mandates.

Today in G igaScience we present the genome of the tegu lizard. It is the most complete assembly of any reptile genome so far and will also aid scientists to study other lizards and snakes. The tegu has mastered a trick that is highly unusual in the reptile world: it can turn on its own heating system.

In GigaScience , Benjamin Makepiece and his co-authors from Liverpool present genome assemblies of two trombidid mite species, the itch-inducing chigger mite and its more benign cousin, the velvet mite.  The bite of the chigger mite can transmit a life-threatening bacterial disease, scrub typhus.

This is the Dawning of the Age of Aequatus Our ICG Prize is over now for another year, and we’ll shortly follow up with an announcement on which of the six winners won the $1000 first prize. To help you see how great all the entries were we will introduce and profile some of the winning papers.

As an Open Science journal, one of the main aims of GigaScience is to break down barriers. Both in the access of research and the underlying data and code supporting it, and the barriers holding back the researchers themselves.

This year we have two posters at the SfN meeting in sunny San Diego, Ca. The first poster is on Sunday morning, Nov.