As big proponents of Open Data, on top of the many diverse datasets associated with GigaScience papers in our integrated GigaDB database, we are continuing to fill it with datasets produced by our BGI hosts.

The rate of species extinction has lent increasing urgency to the description of new species, but in this supposedly networked “big data” era the process of cataloging the rich tapestry of life has changed little since the time of Linnaeus.

Depositing data in GigaDB helps authors win BMC Open Data Award by boosting confidence in unexpected research findings Last night at the Beyond the Genome conference in San Francisco, researchers were presented with this year’s BioMed Central Open Data Award for their work demonstrating that DNA methylation occurs in the parasitic worm Trichinella spiralis , a human pathogen also known as “pork worm” due to it being

A lot has already been written about last months Assemblathon2 paper in GigaScience (see the growing list of articles here), but for the box-set completists interested in squeezing every last bit of insight into the project and how it was put together, there was a lot of additional material left over from the recent Biome Q&A with Keith Bradnam that we thought it could be useful to post in a (hopefully final) blog posting.

Gamers to join ash dieback fight-back Next time you sit next to someone on the train playing a game on their smartphone don’t be too dismissive. They may be harnessing the most state of the art genomics technology in the fight to save Northern Europe’s woodlands from destruction.

Big Data Publishing (credit Jenny Cham, CC-BY) As mentioned in our previous posting, on top of the many great talks and sessions we attended at ISMB in Berlin last month, we were kept even busy helping to organize and present in a special Beyond-the-PDF inspired “What Bioinformaticians need to know about digital publishing beyond the PDF” workshop.

Open Science flourishes at BOSC and ISMB It’s been a busy couple of weeks for GigaScience , with our 1st birthday, publication of a special anniversary print issue sponsored by Aspera, and publication of the (unusually reviewed) Assemblathon2 paper. These all spanned and were coordinated with the ISMB meeting in Berlin, the yearly gathering of the computational biology community.

Biggest ever contest to put genome assemblers through their paces If you haven’t caught it yet, the largest systematic assessment the process of genome assembly carried out to date has been published this week in GigaScience . The second Assemblathon competition saw 21 teams submit 43 entries based on data from three different unassembled parrot, cichlid fish, and boa constrictor genomes sequenced using three different

GigaScience reaches its first anniversary of publication, and achieves several milestones in changing how life science research is published One year on from our launch, we are unveiling new features and functionality at the Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB) meeting at the ICC in Berlin (pictured) this week.

Galaxy shines in the land of the midnight sun Immediately after beer, mussels and genomics at ICG-Europe in Ghent (see BGI’s write-up of the event), last week was a blur of eye-wateringly expensive alcohol, brown cheese and reproducible research at the Galaxy Community Conference in Oslo.

**Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA)**To tie in with the upcoming Automated Function Prediction Special Interest Group (AFP-SIG) at the ISMB/ECCB 2013 meeting in Berlin, GigaScience and the organisers are launching a call for submissions to a thematic series of research from the meeting and beyond