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.

The Center for Antibody Technologies headed by Professor Andreas Laustsen-Kiel (Technical University of Denmark) used high-throughput methods to systematically analyze the venoms of the 26 most deadly snakes in sub-Saharan Africa. The results are now published in Gigascience . Each year, around 500,000 people in sub-Saharan Africa suffer from snake bites, causing an estimated 7,000 to 20,000 deaths.

Citizen Science at UNEA4 As GigaScience has the aim of opening and democratising science as far as it can go, we even work towards the involvement of non-professional “citizen scientists” in the scientific process.

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.

View towards the National Wine Centre of Australia (conference venue) from the Adelaide Botanic Garden Having just attended our first plant phenomics conference – it was great to learn how far the field has progressed and how rapidly it continues to progress with the advancement of new technologies for high-throughput phenotyping.

I’m a genomicist, get me into here. Today is DNA Day, commemorating the day in 1953 when Watson, Crick, Wilkins, Franklin et al. published their Nature papers on the structure of DNA, as well as the day in 2003 that the completion of the Human Genome Project was declared.

GigaScience utilizes and promotes Open Science in all its forms, and one of the key areas in this ecosystem is Citizen Science – opening and democratising science to such an extent it is powered by public participation.

3000 Rice Genome Sequences Made Publicly Available on World Hunger Day Yesterday marked the publication in GigaScience of the first data from the 3,000 Rice Genomes Project, a collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and BGI; as well as a commentary from the Directors of these institutes outlining the goals of this ambitious project.