Today, the first biological and biomedical “data” journal GigaScience celebrates its 10th year of being at the forefront of open scientific publishing. GigaScience was launched on July 12, 2012, at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) conference in Long Beach, CA; and the journal’s team is currently at the 30th ISMB Conference in Madison, WI, to host a celebration of their first decade alongside the publication of an Editorial detailing their achievements in promoting open science and goals for the future. With the recent release of UNESCO’s recommendations for open science, GigaScience takes its 10th birthday as an opportunity to look back at what the journal has achieved among these recommendations and where the journal needs to direct its energies in the future. The editorial published today is part of a special series of commentaries that cover changes in a variety of scientific areas over the last decade, these include changes in open data, standards, conservation, imaging, women-in-science, and more.

In a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, MIT Sloan School of Management Prof. Andrew W. Lo and Hebrew University School of Business Prof. Moshe Levy have found strong support for Hamilton's rule in an experiment involving monetary transactions among human subjects with varying degrees of genetic relatedness.

The fossil record over the last half a billion years shows biodiversity as a zigzagging pattern of species births and extinctions. For decades scientist have attempted to answer the question: Which rules supreme – life or the environment? To explain this macroevolution, scientists have used two opposing theories: the Red Queen versus the Court Jester theory, inspired by the story Alice in Wonderland. New research by McGill University and Vilnius University puts these two theories to the test.

The latest Virtual Issue from Genome Biology and Evolution highlights articles that provide new insight into the deep evolutionary relationships among extant organisms and the origin of eukaryotes from among archaeal lineages. All cellular organisms are descended from a shared ancestor, often referred to as LUCA—the last universal common ancestor. Relationships among these organisms can be depicted by an evolutionary network known as the “tree of life”, which for the past few decades has included three major forms of life—bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. Evolutionary biologists have long sought to understand the placement of LUCA within this framework, as well as the origin of LECA—the last eukaryotic common ancestor. Unfortunately, accurately inferring relationships among microbial lineages presents a major challenge due to the vast evolutionary distances involved, as well as the frequent lateral transfer of genetic material between lineages. Recently, however, new data and methods have resulted in profound changes to our understanding of the tree of life.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet identify an epigenetic regulator controlling the very first cell type specification in the human embryo. The study is published in Nature Cell Biology.

Industry produces acetone and isopropanol using processes that release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Researchers have now developed a new fermentation process that efficiently converts waste carbon oxide gases into acetone and isopropanol. This use of engineered bacteria advances progress on “carbon-negative” biomanufacturing for more sustainable industrial production and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

A research team at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), using a synthetic biology approach, has developed an engineered live biotherapeutic product (eLBP) that, when given together with commonly used antibiotics known as beta-lactams (which includes the well-known antibiotic penicillin), protects the gut microbiome from dysbiosis. The study is published in Nature Biomedical Engineering.