Monthly Archives: March 2011

World Autism Awareness Day

In 2007 the United Nations General Assembly declared 2 April as World Autism Awareness Day (WAAD) in perpetuity and this year sees the fourth annual celebration of this event. This UN resolution is one of only three official disease-specific United Nations Days and brings the world’s attention to autism, a pervasive disorder that affects tens… Read more »

Biology

The International Human Microbiome Congress 2011

The International Human Microbiome Congress 2011 held in Vancouver this month could only have taken place in this era of next generation sequencing technologies. The microbiome, consisting of the microbial communities present at different body sites, is difficult to culture. Thus the ability to sequence directly either the genomes or the uniquely identifying 16S rDNA sequence… Read more »

Biology

Cilia is now accepting submissions!

Cilia, an exciting new open access journal that publishes basic and translational research on the biology of cilia and related diseases, is now open for submissions. The journal welcomes research in many areas of interest, including signaling and developmental pathways linked to cilia, sensory neuroscience, diseases linked to ciliary dysfunction, cell cycle biology related to… Read more »

Biology
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Genome Biology editorial on the closure of NCBI's SRA

The US government-funded National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has recently announced that it will be withdrawing funding for its Sequence Read Archive (SRA), its repository for short read sequencing data. At BioMed Central we hold that the free availability of data is a key requirement for scientific work, and so we have been routinely… Read more »

Biology

Principles of gene clustering differ between model organisms

In a new article in Genome Biology, Laurence Hurst finds that asking the same question in different organisms can arrive at strikingly different answers. Hurst, who is a Professor of Evolutionary Genetics at the University of Bath, had previously shown that clustering of co-expressed genes in the yeast genome is evolutionarily conserved. His work on… Read more »

Biology

Jonathan Eisen: 2011 Benjamin Franklin Laureate

Jonathan Eisen, a renowned open access advocate is awarded the tenth annual Benjamin Franklin award. This award, voted for by members of Bioinformatics.org, recognizes those providing free and open access to materials and methods in science. Jonathan, a scientist of repute and also Academic Editor-in-Chief of PLoS Biology is a supporter of all open access… Read more »

Biology
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Females find cocaine more addictive than males do

In drug addiction research, it is well established that an enhanced response to novelty can predispose certain individuals to addiction. Research has previously shown that rats, selectively bred to have an increased locomotor response to novelty, display differences in the amount of cocaine they self-administer, compared to rats bred to be less reactive. Not only… Read more »

Biology

New Retrovirology Editorial Board members

Periodically, Retrovirology rotates its Editorial Board members.  This year, we welcome Hisatoshi Shida (Hokkaido University), Sarah Rowland-Jones (Oxford University), Marco Salemi (University of Florida), Linqi Zhang (Tsinghua University) and Yuntao Wu (George Mason University) to our board.   We thank departing board members (Susan Marriott, Naoki Mori, Jennifer Nyborg, Tom Hope, and Toshi Watanabe) who have served… Read more »

Biology