Last week marked peer review week, an event we’ve followed since the inaugural event in 2015 (which you can see from our previous blog). Like next months Open Access Week, this is a great opportunity to throw some light on what goes on “under the hood” in academic publishing, as well as encourage innovation and uptake of more open and transparent research practices.

In my previous post I attempted to identify all the ways that a new gene can come about, after defining what I meant by "new" and "gene." Two questions came up, one a comment on the post, and the other via Facebook. 1. What about exon shuffling? Isn't that a mechanism by which new genes are made?

*As a journal focussed on open science we are big promoters of research parasites (and research on parasites), and try to feeds them with open data and tools. It is therefore appropriate this is the second year GigaScience has supported and sponsored the Research Parasite awards.

While the Portal Project focuses primarily on rodents and plants, there is more to our ecosystem than just those taxa. This week’s Portal Project post focuses on some insect work at the site.

Sequencers versus the smugglers. CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), is one of the largest and oldest conservation and sustainable use agreements in existence, and provides a legal framework for protecting endangered plants and animals around the world.

With the current annual data creation rate estimated to be in the tens of zettabytes, the flood of information currently being generated in every area of human life is crashing up against limited data storage solutions. However, DNA, which serves as a storage system for biological information, has been proposed as a potential means to store an unlimited amount of information.

The latest installment from the Portal Project Blog on the watch for Banner-tailed Kangaroo Rats

How did we get those daily pics of the desert turning green in a week? Meet Portal’s new toy: the Phenocam.

Ever wondered how fast the desert can turn green when the rains get going? There’s a Portal blog post on that (with pics)!

A guest post from last week on the Portal Blog about studying Kangaroo rat placentas!