Sophisticated computational analyses must be performed on metabolomics data in order to measure the abundances of the metabolites. However, this typically requires expert knowledge in computer programming and biostatistics, restricting the usefulness of metabolomics to specialised laboratories.
Singapore – a wonderful city of diverse cultures and culinary affair, is not just about the infamous chilli crab or signature cocktail, Singapore Sling, but from the 13-19 April the vibrant country plays host to one of the largest meetings in genetics and genomics.
The 2013 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2013) and GigaScience are today announcing a call for papers for a special thematic focused series on studies utilizing large-scale datasets and workflows. Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research allowing their growing community of users to reproduce and share analyses.
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.
The BBSRC has just released an excellent video and article on crowdsourcing killer disease outbreaks very relevant to our recent commentary and blog postings on the OpenAshDB (the Ash Dieback disease crowdsourcing) project.
Bye Bye Bluebells Bluebell woods, the dense carpets of violet–blue flowers found in ancient woodland are a spectacular and famous springtime sight in Britain, but this picture postcard scene is threatened as never before.
With everyone in a reflective mood as the year comes to a close, one of the big scientific trends of 2012 has obviously been the high profile that open-access and more open methods of carrying out science has received.
Regular reader of this blog will be aware of our efforts to promote data citation using digital object identifiers (DOIs), and this week, alongside Rebecca Lawrence from F1000 Research and Kevin Ashley from the Digital Curation Centre, our Editor in Chief Laurie Goodman has a correspondence in Nature strongly making this case.
With advances in sequencing technologies leading to a so-called “data deluge”, the amount of data supporting a biological study is becoming increasingly unwieldy and difficult to make available. These issues have led to a lack of transparency in analyses of sequencing data, resulting in an ever-increasing reproducibility gap.
New research in GigaScience on the genome of the Wuzhishan minipig The availability of a high quality reference genome sequence for a species is extremely important in the deeper understanding of its biology, evolution, and comparative genomics.
