*The field of synthetic biology, designing and building engineered biological systems through DNA synthesis and genetic engineering, is rapidly moving to a genome scale. In a similar trajectory to genomic sequencing and genome projects two decades ago, it has moved from engineering single genes, entire synthetic bacterial genomes (J Craig Venter’s notorious “Synthia”), to the eukaryotic organism stage.
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
Using big data to understand the tree of life New work just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and GigaScience reveals important details about key transitions in the evolution of plant life on our planet, and present a huge cache of computational results, data and tools for plant biologists.
Shedding light on what the Optical Mapping System can provide for genome analysis, here we present a guest posting from optical mapping pioneer and developer (and GigaScience Editorial Board Member), David C. Schwartz, who is a Professor of Chemistry and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ** Taking the Google Maps approach: providing comprehensive, scalable worldviews** We use maps in our daily lives to
Following our efforts encouraging open-science projects, such as the community funded “Peoples Parrot” and OpenAshDieback, today we have a guest posting from Fay-Wei Li and Kathleen Pryer from the Department of Biology at Duke University covering a crowdfunding effort to sequence the Azolla genome.
New research and data published in GigaScience and PLOS ONE provides complete open access to detailed 3D images of earthworms To quote the American cartoonist Gary Larson: all things play a role in nature, even the lowly worm—but perhaps never in such a visually stunning way as that presented in two papers published last week in GigaScience and PLOS ONE . The work and data presented here
Being the largest land predator, the fearsome and enigmatic Polar Bear is seen by many as a powerful symbol to highlight of the threats to the environment through global warming.
As big proponents of Open Data, on top of the many diverse datasets associated with GigaScience papers in our integrated GigaDB database, we are continuing to fill it with datasets produced by our BGI hosts.
Following from our previous blog posting, here we profile and interview Dr Xin Zhou, lead author of our recent “squishome” insect goo metabarcoding paper.
Insect goo aids biodiversity research Apologies to Jonathan Eisen (see Badomics in the journal), but today in GigaScience we publish a new “squishomics” approach for assessing and understanding biodiversity, using the slightly wacky sounding method of combining DNA-soup made from crushed-up insects and the latest sequencing technology.