In the data driven era, not only in research but in our day-to-day lives, people are creating more and more personal digitized data that enables human-participant research in social sciences and personalized medicine. However, with numerous data streams and types this raises concerns such as how to merge and share such data, as well as ethical problems.

In GigaScience , Benjamin Makepiece and his co-authors from Liverpool present genome assemblies of two trombidid mite species, the itch-inducing chigger mite and its more benign cousin, the velvet mite.  The bite of the chigger mite can transmit a life-threatening bacterial disease, scrub typhus.

Giardia, a protozoan parasite which people typically pick up through drinking infected water or contaminated food, can cause diarrhoea and stomach pains. New research published today in GigaScience , with supporting data in GigaDB, provides insights into the mechanisms that cause the symptoms of giardiasis. Currently more than 200,000 people are ill with giardiasis and there are 500,000 new cases a year.

In support of Brain Awareness Week, we have asked Cameron Craddock, Director of the Computational NeuroImaging Lab, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and Director of Imaging, Child Mind Institute, to write a blog highlighting open science in neuroimaging, and to announce our upcoming publication of the 2015 Brainhack Proceedings and the Brainhack Thematic Series.

The current global panic about Zika is a “data gap“ issue: a vacuum of information due to gaps in understanding of its spread and pathogenesis, and gaps in sharing the research data and specimens that will enable the global research community to keep one step ahead of the disease spread.

**The Human Genetics Massive: #ASHG15 in Baltimore ** This week the human genetics “tribe” (as NIH Director Francis Collins referred to “his people” here) have muscled out the Eastside and Westside crews to take over the Baltimore waterfront for the yearly American Society of Human Genetics (#ASHG15) meeting.

Following from his guest blog in October on “Approaches and resources to slow the spread of infection”, Michael Dean from the Center of Cancer Research at the NIH uses his data oriented approach to give an update of where the Ebola epidemic is. While there may be less media coverage (apart from in the UK), this doesn’t relate to the situation on the ground.

A paper published in Nature Biotechnology today reveals the most comprehensive catalogue of genes in any single microbiome to date. While the roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome have been available for over a decade, the gene catalogue of the microbiome, our much larger “other genome” has to date been much more poorly understood and characterized.

The BBSRC has just released an excellent video and article on crowdsourcing killer disease outbreaks very relevant to our recent commentary and blog postings on the OpenAshDB (the Ash Dieback disease crowdsourcing) project.

Our whistlestop summer conference tour circumnavigating the globe has come to a jetlagged end, with the final conference being last weeks HUPO (Human Proteomics Organisation) congress in Geneva.