A paper published in Nature Biotechnology today reveals the most comprehensive catalogue of genes in any single microbiome to date. While the roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome have been available for over a decade, the gene catalogue of the microbiome, our much larger “other genome” has to date been much more poorly understood and characterized.

At GigaScience , one of our major goals is to improve transparency and reproducibility of research and one of the ways we do this is through open peer review.

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.

3000 Rice Genome Sequences Made Publicly Available on World Hunger Day Yesterday marked the publication in GigaScience of the first data from the 3,000 Rice Genomes Project, a collaboration between the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), and BGI; as well as a commentary from the Directors of these institutes outlining the goals of this ambitious project.

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.

Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) A key to understanding life at the molecular level is based on accurate protein annotation at the functional level.

Today we have a guest posting from F1000’s Iain Hrynaszkiewicz covering the topic of medical data sharing One of the world’s most influential medical journals recently highlighted data sharing as an important issue to be addressed if we are to improve the quality of reporting of biomedical research.

At GigaScience one of our major goals is to take the scientific publishing beyond dead trees and static PDFs to a more dynamic and interactive process, much like science itself has embraced the Internet to become more networked and data driven.

Researchers release a treasure trove of data on the developing retina, pushing the boundaries of neuroscience publishing by presenting it dynamically and reproducibly. A new paper in GigaScience today demonstrates a major step forward for reproducible research and public data-sharing in the neurosciences with the publication and release of a huge cache of electrophysiology data resources.

Endorsing Data Citation Nicely timed for the Data Citation Principles workshop at the IDCC meeting in San Francisco yesterday, the finalized Joint Declaration of Data Citation Principles has just been posted on the Force11 website.