British Geological Survey remotely operated sea bed rockdrills and vibrocorers: new advances to meet the needs of the scientific community

The British Geological Survey (BGS) have developed a number of coring and drilling systems for use in science projects in the UK and internationally. These include 3m, 4m and 6m vibrocoring systems; a 5m combined rockdrill and vibrocorer system (RD1); an oriented drill designed specifically to recover samples for use in palaeomagnetic studies; and a 55m rockdrill (RockDrill2). The BGS has recently completed a series of modifications to increase the flexibility and performance of its vibrocoring and rock-drilling capability to meet the ever increasing needs of the scientific community. The latest generation vibrocorers can be operated without an umbilical power cable. The new system not only allows vibrocoring in greater water depths, but can also be used on a wider range of vessels including those with limited deck space. The BGS RockDrill2 can core up to 55m sub-seabed by focussing on reducing the overall weight therefore extending operational water depth to 4000m

Maintenance of transposon-free regions throughout vertebrate evolution

Background: We recently reported the existence of large numbers of regions up to 80 kb long that lack transposon insertions in the human, mouse and opossum genomes. These regions are significantly associated with loci involved in developmental and transcriptional regulation

Genomics Virtual Laboratory: a practical bioinformatics workbench for the cloud

Analyzing high throughput genomics data is a complex and compute intensive task, generally requiring numerous software tools and large reference data sets, tied together in successive stages of data transformation and visualisation. A computational platform enabling best practice genomics analysis ideally meets a number of requirements, including: a wide range of analysis and visualisation tools, closely linked to large user and reference data sets ; workflow platform(s) enabling accessible, reproducible, portable analyses, through a flexible set of interfaces ; highly available, scalable computational resources ; and flexibility and versatility in the use of these resources to meet demands and expertise of a variety of users. Access to an appropriate computational platform can be a significant barrier to researchers, as establishing such a platform requires a large upfront investment in hardware, experience, and expertise