Infant eczema – a microbial link • Identifying Intimate Partner Violence • It’s a dogslife for canine disease • Aquatic athletes • Barcoding biodiversity in the sub-Arctic • Cancer on Twitter

Microbiology: Infant eczema – a microbial link

The guts of infants begin to be colonized by microbes from their first exposure to the world after birth. There has been much study linking the composition of this microbiota to the development of allergic diseases, with conflicting results. A new study published this month in BMC Microbiology  uses a high-throughput approach to identify the diversity of bacteria present in the guts of children with eczema during early childhood. Lotta Nylund and colleagues found that children with eczema had a more diverse and adult-like microbiota …

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The BMC series is delighted to host a series of companion articles to the publication of the swine genome.

The articles are published in a number of BMC series journals and the journal GigaScience are gathered on  a cross-journal article series page. The papers cover a broad spectrum of subjects related to the pig genome: more details of the content is given in our blog, “Companion articles to the swine genome sequence“.

Image credit: David Merrett on Flickr, CC BY 2.0

BioMed Central first approached the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), the body providing the rules by which animal species are named, in September 2005. We wanted to ensure that our journals best served the needs of the taxonomy and biodiversity research communities and ensure that we complied with the rules of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.

In order to comply with ‘the Code’, BioMed Central had to guarantee that printed copies of papers describing zoological taxa were available at five major publicly accessible libraries. This was a slightly bizarre state of affairs in the digital age, when anyone could simply access the article online.

The ICZN proposed a revision to ‘the Code’ in 2008, to expand …

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