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.

Passiflora , commonly known as Passion Vines or Passion Flowers is a genus encompassing around 500 species, all of which exhibit such huge variation in leaf shape.  To further understand the unique diversity of Passiflora leaves, a recent paper published in GigaScience , presents a morphometric analysis and unique open dataset encompassing over 3,300 leaves from 40 different Passiflora species.

Der Hacker Cassio und die Biologin Piera arbeiten zusammen an der Digitalisierung des kompletten lateinamerikanischen Genpools. Ein wahrhaft phantastisches Big-Data-Projekt, über dessen Motive und Auswirkungen die argentinische Schriftstellerin Pola Oloixarac in ihrem rasanten Science-Fiction-Roman „Kryptozän“ erzählt.In Lateinamerika ist die Argentinierin Pola Oloixarac seit einigen Jahren eine vieldiskutierte Schriftstellerin.

Taylor Noble As the ecology community expands, it is now adopting new ways of making sense of the plethora of data produced from diverse approaches, including ocean research, eco-genomics, limnology, and macrosystems ecology, through more integrative means – improving our understanding of biology in a broader sense.

Building an open, community-supported, e-infrastructure for medical metabolomics data. The European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme is funding the PhenoMeNal (Phenome and Metabolome aNalysis) project that aims to support data processing and analysis pipelines for molecular phenotype data generated from metabolomics applications.

Imagine you would like to study a plant species of interest, say for its ability to supply food, fiber, fuel or just to gain a deeper scientific understanding. Two approaches immediately come to mind: an understanding of its underlying genetics and an understanding of plant phenomics, which spans how the genes express themselves across huge length scales from the microscopic to the whole plant itself.

The great responsibility Every discipline of science is unique.  Ecology is no exception.  We work in diverse, complex, context-dependent systems. Global change and anthropogenic influences are very real issues for the health of the planet that ecologists often examine.  As a discipline, we have moved from context-dependent, local studies to much larger, integrated studies.

Investigativ- oder „Inszenierungsjournalismus“? Alf Frommer bemerkt auf newsroom.de einen Trend im digitalen Journalismus, der sich in den #PanamaPapers besonders deutlich zeige.

In support of Brain Awareness Week, we have asked Cameron Craddock, Director of the Computational NeuroImaging Lab, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and Director of Imaging, Child Mind Institute, to write a blog highlighting open science in neuroimaging, and to announce our upcoming publication of the 2015 Brainhack Proceedings and the Brainhack Thematic Series.

The genomics community has been held up as an exemplar in data sharing practices since the human genome project, but the metabolomics community is catching up fast, with the Metabolights database being the fast growing repository at the EBI.