This week in GigaScience we published a new genomic analysis of the endangered Oriental Stork, bringing good news: The population’s genetic health is still surprisingly strong, with high genetic diversity and low levels of inbreeding. Climate change, forest wildfires, hunting and the expansion of agriculture, industry and other human activities threaten the Oriental Stork ( Ciconia boyciana ), which is listed as

Reaching new highs in Cannabis sativa Omics There is a growing interest in Cannabis (Cannabis sativa) research, and recent changes in regulations have spurred numerous genomic studies of this once-prohibited plant. Industrial hemp and medical marijuana are now global multibillion-dollar industries, but due to its widespread prohibition in the 20th and early 21st century it […]

The post Getting deep into the weeds of Cannabis genomics: Join our first Cassyni Seminar appeared first on GigaBlog.

GigaScience Press is helping CitizenScience.Asia mobilise Citizen Scientists Across Asia for a groundbreaking biodiversity initiative from October 18 to 27 2024. Regular readers will have seen our efforts to promote and amplify citizen science projects, citizen science being a key driver of “Open Engagement of Societal Actors”, which was highlighted by UNESCO as one of the four fundamental pillars of Open Science (and flagged

Watch a DOME Webinar on Machine Learning Best Practices & Recommendations on 24th September 2024 In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in scientific publications in journals publishing computational research such as ours utilising Machine Learning (ML). This represents a significant challenge for disseminating and assessing scientific research as the black box and […]

The post Machine Learning Standards in the Wild. DOME Webinar on ML Recommendations and Applications appeared first on GigaBlog.

GigaScience’s T2T Series has now launched, with our first papers showcasing new Telomere-to-Telomere methods and genomic data sets. While the first draft of the Human Genome was declared complete in April 2003, it took a further two decades for the publication of the first complete, gapless sequence of a human genome in March 2022.

* Opening a **Cabinet of Curiosities in Montreal ***Readers of this blog must know every summer the GigaScience Press team gathers at the ISMB (International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, where the great and good of computational biology gather for the largest bioinformatics conference of the year.

MicroCT imaging is an exceptional tool for 3D visualisation. A new Data Note published in GigaScience reports on a unique, high-quality series of MicroCT images that covers the lifespan of an amphibian from tadpole to froglet to mature adult frog.

GigaScience Press would like to congratulate Victoire Nsabatien for winning a 2024 Ben Barres Spotlight Award for his two preprints publicly reviewed and published by GigaByte. Prizes are a good way of positively reinforcing and incentivizing good practice in opening up science, and eLife should be commended creating the Ben Barres Spotlight Award for groups that are underrepresented in biology and medicine.

FUNC on Safari: Functional Metagenomics conference 2024 at Skukuza, Kruger National Park, South Africa (2nd – 5th June 2024) FMG24 participants group photo, taken outside the conference centre at Skukuza rest camp. GigaScience Press were once again proud sponsors of the Functional Metagenomics conference (FMG24). Functional Metagenomics is an area of interest for the journal, particularly via our MetaFUNC thematic series.

Plant phenotyping – the science of gathering precise information and measurements on plants – has seen massive improvements recently, and the combination of sensor technology and AI methods will continue to change the way crops are assessed and improved. A new article in GigaScience demonstrates where this is going: Jonas Bömer and colleagues at the Institute of Sugar Beet Research (Göttingen) used