Genome Biology is very pleased to announce the Guest Editors of our special issue on the RBPome as John Rinn and Jernej Ule. The issue will be published in late 2013.

RNA binding proteins and their recognition elements within the transcriptome
The issue will focus on RNA binding proteins (RBPs), and the RNA molecules and motifs to which they bind: it is this RNA landscape, sculpted by RBPs, that we believe to be a particularly exciting and fast-moving area of research at the present time.

Or, as John puts it: "Almost all RNA genes function through protein interactions - with the ongoing explosion of RNA genes …

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Taking into account the importance of the role that genetic recombination plays in evolution, adaptation, survival, and – perhaps most importantly – sex, we know surprisingly little about the molecular foundations of this phenomenon. What we do know is that genetic recombination is not a completely random process; that it follows a pattern. Some chromosomal regions are more, and some less, likely to be affected by double-stranded breaks – and the recombination events that follow. Areas with a high frequency of recombination have been appropriately dubbed ‘recombination hotspots’.

Now, recombination hotspots are a bit of an enigma themselves: for a long time no one could put their finger on how these hotspots are defined – or chosen. But, as it …

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One of the most wonderful things about science, to my mind, is the way its fundamental principles are simultaneously both universal and personal. Quantum physics helps to explain the nature of grandiose concepts such as time and space, but it also applies to the insignificant particles that make up my own cells. Equally, within these very cells, at any moment, biological processes newly reported in the literature are taking place, as are those that have yet to be discovered.

Life's secret
For this reason, when I look at one of the beautiful X-ray diffraction photos taken by Rosalind Franklin and her PhD student Ray Gosling in the early 1950s, from painstaking work performed on calf thymus samples in gloomy …

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Stand by for an important update on Genome Biology's highly anticipated, ultra-tricky, ultra-cool, *supreme* DNA60 Bioinformatics Challenge with a truly amazing prize…

Recently, we excited informatics enthusiasts with the prospect of a special Genome Biology Bioinformatics Challenge in honor of DNA60, but we were lamentably low on the detail. Here, we are putting that right.

So what is this Challenge all about then?
DNA60 celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Watson and Crick's Double Helix, and Genome Biology will be marking the occasion, April 25th, with some special content. But we also wanted to have some fun, and to give away some prizes, so we decided to …

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There is something amazingly captivating about turtles: those slow, long-living, hard-shelled creatures, which look very much like how you’d expect a miniature version of some dinosaur to look. They have inspired artists for many years, and continue to do so, from the Mock Turtle in Lewis Caroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, through the impressive, world-carrying Great A’Tuin in Terry Pratchett novels, to the symbols of late 20th century pop-culture that are the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Turtles are enigmatic and elegant, reason enough for their study; with many turtle species on the brink of extinction, however, the need to capture the full scope of their biology becomes more urgent. It is perhaps surprising, therefore, that turtles …

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JBS Haldane famously remarked that the Creator appears to be inordinately fond of beetles – with over 400,000 species described, they make up over a quarter of all known animal species. This enthusiasm has not been shared by genomicists. Only a single beetle genome has been completed, that of the red flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum. Now, a new publication in Genome Biology DOUBLES our knowledge of beetle genomes, by describing the sequencing and assembly of the genome of the mountain pine beetle, Dendroctonus ponderosae.

D. ponderosae is a species of bark beetle native to North America. The beetles lay eggs under the bark of various species of pine trees and then release pheromones to attract more beetles. When the eggs …

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Looking at the problem of sex determination from our anthropocentric perspective, it is easy to forget that the world doesn’t revolve around the Y chromosome. Some animals determine their sex simply by changing the number of X chromosomes (BFF of many Genome Biology readers, C. elegans, belongs to this group). For others, like crocodiles and some turtles, the sex will be determined by the temperature at which the egg incubates. The platypus has 10 sex chromosomes, but, surprisingly, seems to lack the sex-determining SRY gene. And then there is the ZW sex chromosome system in birds, in which the sex of the offspring depends on the ovum and not the sperm.

This is not the only difference between us and …

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