A team led by scientists from Monash University have completed a major milestone towards achieving the rescue of the critically endangered helmeted honeyeater.

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.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

A Grassroots Funding effort in Puerto Rico enables genome sequencing of the critically endangered Puerto Rican parrot The rationale and scope for GigaScience has been to cover and provide a home for the growing number of studies producing and handling large-scale biological data, and this “big-data” data bonanza is not just due to well funded labs, but an increasingly globalized and distributed network of researchers.