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.

The academic journal publishing system sure feels all too often a bit like a sinking boat: we have a reproducibility leak an affordability leak a functionality leak a data leak a code leak an interoperability leak a discoverability leak a peer-review leak a long-term preservation leak a link rot leak an evaluation/assessment leak a data visualization leak … … … and even a tiny access leak still remains even after 30 years of trying to fix it.

Open Data in the Third Dimension Data are not just ephemeral units of magnetisation sitting on computer hard drives. The linking of the word to storable computer information only goes back to the mid-20 ^th century, but the use of the latin word data in English goes back to at least the 17 ^th Century.

Following our efforts promoting open science and “community genomics” projects that have included the “Peoples Parrot” , community cactus, and our very own Bauhinia Genome, today we have a guest posting from the Transbiome team.

GigaScience Press and River Valley Technologies, with the help of Stencila, launch their first interactive “ Executable Research Article ” from their new scientific journal, GigaByte.

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.