February was an unexpectedly busy month for science. A mangy skeleton lying unceremoniously under a concrete parking lot was shown by forensic science to be no lesser a historical figure than the last Plantagenet King of England. To trump Richard III, a once-in-a-century meteor strike in Russia startled stargazers distracted by an asteroid flyby, in a coincidence that I have yet to see a p-value for. But in the genomics world, even stray royals and exploding space rocks cannot compete with the excitement of Florida's annual AGBT conference. In the words of Genome Biology's Editor Clare Garvey: "Rothberg describes a 'future-proof' machine. It's gotta be #agbt13". Yes, machines and the future, that pretty much …

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On the list of humanity’s priorities, tissue regeneration finds itself near the very top; together with eternal youth and immortality. And, in legends and myths, both heroes and villains – but most commonly monsters – possess an amazing ability to grow back lost organs and limbs.

Myths can have a grain of truth, though. In 2011, Genome Biology published an article describing the transcriptome of the regenerating head of a planarian flatworm, Schmidtea mediterranea. In early 2012, we published another article seeking to unveil the intricacies of regulatory mechanisms governing flatworm regeneration.

Fortunately, we don’t have to look that far down the evolutionary line to find species capable of tissue regeneration.  Much more complex organisms can be found as …

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One of the most fascinating leaps in evolution is the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms. How individual free living cells joined forces to create more complex multicellular organisms is still not well understood. For metazoans, this transition is thought to have occurred through a colonial intermediate that was composed of cells similar to choanoflagellates. In an article published today in Genome Biology, Fairclough et al. use choanoflagellates to gain insight into this evolutionary transition.

Choanoflagellates are free-living unicellular organisms and are the closest living relatives of metazoans. The similarity between these organisms and the proposed ancestor of metazoans has made them attractive to scientists interested in studying this evolutionary shift. Indeed, a previous study of the genome …

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So you have just spent the last couple of years on the project: using shiny brandnew machines to sequence the most complex genomes on Earth. You dotted your ‘i’s, crossed the ‘t’s, identified all ‘g’s and ‘c’s. From the (still growing) range of the available assemblers, you picked the one you thought best. And you ended up with the assembly that might be perfect, but might just as well be a disaster waiting to happen.

Both genome assemblies and assemblers can be assessed using a number of different quality metrics. For a long time, N50 was a leading metric used for that purpose but, although N50 scaffold and contig lengths most of the time correlate with assembly quality, the measure …

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In 2011 Arumugam et al. described for the first time characteristic patterns of human gut microflora composition, which were seemingly preserved world-wide, across different nations and cultures. These patterns, named enterotypes, were defined by the significantly higher abundance of one of three bacterial genera: Bacteroides (enterotype 1), Prevotella (enterotype 2) and Ruminococcus (enterotype 3).

This simple concept of enterotypes has since divided the microbiome field. Some researchers found themselves influenced by the alluring idea of discrete microflora types, while others dismissed it out of hand as overly simplistic and as blurring what they view as a more accurate, continuous image of our gut flora. It seems, however, that at this stage it is simply a bit too early to …

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