It’s DNA day, celebrating two historic milestones: The publication of the structure of DNA in 1953, and the completion of the human genome project in 2003.

***With ongoing the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic providing us with unprecedented insight into the progression of a disease outbreak, and unprecedented time in the lock down to turn us all into armchair epidemiologists. This includes near real-time sharing and analysis of genomics data through platforms like nextstrain, and of ways to view the infection, mortality and testing statistics via a growing number of online dashboards.

Q&A with Stephen Piccolo talking about ShinyLearner, a benchmarking tool for machine-learning classification algorithms, & how it was tested with CODECHECK

The post Reproducible Classification. Q&A on ShinyLearner & the CODECHECK certificate, pt. 2 appeared first on GigaBlog.

Out today in GigaScience is ShinyLearner, a new tool to make it easier to perform benchmark comparisons of classification algorithms. This tool stands out by making this process super systematic and reproducible, and despite needing to interface with many different libraries and languages it uses software containers (and a CodeOcean demo) so end users don’t need to worry about this complexity.

Stuck indoors and bored of passively reading information on the coronavirus (and more) when you could be doing something more constructive? GigaScience now has hypothes.is integration for collaborative annotation, and we would encourage readers to interact with our content more collaboratively.

As publishers of a lot of plant and animal genomes, the biggest conference for this research community is the appropriately named Plant and Animal Genome Conference (PAG). We’ve attended a number of these giant meetings in their San Diego base, and in recent years they have been branching out to host satellites in Asia (PAG Asia, which last year included a workshop that we participated in). And we attended the 28 ^th edition of the

With much of the GigaScience team spanning the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border and now confined to remote working, the current 2019-novel coronavirus outbreak has been particularly disruptive and close to home.

Hear more on how an international team led by researchers at the University of Copenhagen has sequenced the elusive giant squid genome.

The post The genome of an elusive giant appeared first on GigaBlog.

This is the last blog post of 2019 and it is time again to look back at some of the amazing research published in GigaScience over the past year. Besides handling manuscripts, reviews and data, the editors and curators also attended conferences near and far, they contributed to policy discussions and prepared the launch of a new journal, GigaByte. More about all these activities below.

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC was the venue for this year’s ASCB|EMBO 2019 Meeting that took place on 7-11 December 2019. The American Society of Cell Biology conference, now merged with the EMBO meeting, is the largest yearly gathering for the cell imaging community, and GigaScience has attended in the past.

As part of the FAIRsharing Community Network (see previous blog) and joint Force11 and Research Data Alliance (RDA) FAIRsharing Working Group we have been involved in efforts to develop a shared, cross-publisher list of recommended data deposition repositories. The first fruits of these are a preprint from the working group and DataCite (of which we are also members) summarising what we feel should be the key criteria for selection.