*A New High-Quality Reindeer Genome Sequence Provides Resources for Studying Evolution, Domestication, and Adaptation to Arctic Climate. But not the secrets of Christmas. * Ewan Birney has previously blogged on the Genome Days of Christmas, but today the full-text version of a particularly Christmassy species has just been published to add to that list.
Last month was the 7th consecutive year we’ve attended our co-publisher BGI’s annual ICG (International Conference on Genomics) gathering in Shenzhen.
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.
GigaScience is always trying to push the boundaries of how we disseminate reproducible research, and to adapt to the challenges of dealing with experiments become more data-intensive.
A high coverage, high quality genome sequence of the butterfly Bicyclus anynana is published today in GigaScience . B. anynana , the squinting bush brown, is a fascinating model species that can modify its morphology in response to environmental clues.
The decline of global honeybee populations are a major environment concern, because of their vital role in our food systems and pollination of flowering plants. Twenty first century ’Omics is coming to the rescue, and published in GigaScience this week is an article that presents the genome and proteome of a mahor threat to bee colonies, the parasitic mite, Tropilaelaps mercedesae.
Not many tree species are iconic enough to have inspired Goethe love poems, but the distinctive and beautiful heart shaped leaves of ginkgo have made it a popular symbol in art and design. Coming from East Asia and having a long association with Buddhist temples and parks in China, Korea and Japan, it was thought to be extinct in the wild and only in more recent times were small wild populations identified in mountain groves in South West China.
Open data is a critical component of the scientific method, but genomes are both identifiable and predictive.
Gigascience this week published a high quality genome of the apple, the “golden delicious” variety, to be precise. Although a version of the Malus domestica genome has already been available, Xuewei Li et al .’s de novo assembly significantly improves on that previous ressource, using a healthy injection of long reads from third generation, “single-molecule” sequencing technology.
Teams of scientists from Spain have published the first complete genome of the olive tree. The specimen sequenced is of the Spanish Farga variety, and is over 1,200 years old.