For centuries, salt detained a preponderant role in worldwide economy and had a great influence on the culture of those connected with it. Portugal’s great geographic and climatic conditions, as well as the use of adequate techniques for the development of the salt industry, have turned Portuguese salt in one of the most sought-after products… Read more »
Predicting externally visible characteristics of the deceased using just genetic information is an extremely difficult task, and one that has only become possible in recent years. New investigative technologies and techniques that improve the accuracy and efficiency of identifying phenotypes from DNA samples are likely to have a huge impact on the fields of forensics… Read more »
We are pleased to announce that a new thematic series ‘Planarians to Parasitism: Evolution, Development and Stem Cells in Flatworms’ to be published jointly in EvoDevo and Parasites & Vectors is now accepting submissions. Pete Olson (Natural History Museum, London) will be guest Editor for this series, which aims to promote comparative approaches between the… Read more »
Following on from Naomi’s blog on the highlights of 2012 in Genome Biology, I’m going to expand on her mention of our cancer articles. We published four cancer-related articles in December: two Research, and two Methods. Jinghui Zhang and colleagues from the St Jude Hospital in Memphis, together with collaborators from Washington University, St Louis… Read more »
A new treatment for superbug Clostridium difficile is published today in the launch issue of Microbiome. Canadian researchers have developed a “super-probiotic”, a synthetic stool called the RePOOPulate, as an alternative to stool transplantation. The RePOOPulate is composed of 33 different bacterial strains isolated from the stool of a healthy 41 year old female at… Read more »
Songbirds learn to sing in the same way that human infants learn to talk: by imitating other members of their species. Their songs are important in establishing territory and signaling reproductive fitness, and the existence of over 4,000 species of songbirds attests to the evolutionary advantage of communicating in this way. Yet among the animal… Read more »
There were two prominent themes to end the year in BMC Biology – cell geometry, on which we launched a new series; and – entirely fortuitously – the evolution and development of eyes, on which as it happens we had an interesting diversity of research submissions. Sizing up cell geometry It can be easy to… Read more »
2012 was ominous in Genome Biology parlance: the dreaded 'Volume 13'. But, happily, our luck remained in good order as we saw our Impact Factor soar to 9.04, while our publications continued to intrigue, inform and enthuse our readership. January opened the year with a human population genetics flavor, courtesy of studies on the Amhara… Read more »