**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

The speed of data Last week was the Bio-IT World Asia meeting in Singapore, and while we didn’t attend this year (see last years conference report in Genome Biology ), our editorial board member Tin-Lap Lee presented on the GigaGalaxy server that we have been collaborating with him on (see slides). Also timed for the meeting, Aspera made a press release on our recent adoption of their suite of software products to

Last week we published our first neuroscience data note containing 10GB of fMRI data hosted and integrated into the paper by a DOI to our GigaDB database. While we have published a number of genomics datasets and data notes (see the Puerto Rican Parrot genome data note and its associated data DOI), this is a nice example of us providing a home for “orphan data”, the long tail of data types without community agreed curated repositories.

Sophisticated computational analyses must be performed on metabolomics data in order to measure the abundances of the metabolites. However, this typically requires expert knowledge in computer programming and biostatistics, restricting the usefulness of metabolomics to specialised laboratories.

Singapore – a wonderful city of diverse cultures and culinary affair, is not just about the infamous chilli crab or signature cocktail, Singapore Sling, but from the 13-19 April the vibrant country plays host to one of the largest meetings in genetics and genomics.

The 2013 Galaxy Community Conference (GCC2013) and GigaScience are today announcing a call for papers for a special thematic focused series on studies utilizing large-scale datasets and workflows. Galaxy is an open, web-based platform for data intensive biomedical research allowing their growing community of users to reproduce and share analyses.

Following from our previous blog posting, here we profile and interview Dr Xin Zhou, lead author of our recent “squishome” insect goo metabarcoding paper.

Insect goo aids biodiversity research Apologies to Jonathan Eisen (see Badomics in the journal), but today in GigaScience we publish a new “squishomics” approach for assessing and understanding biodiversity, using the slightly wacky sounding method of combining DNA-soup made from crushed-up insects and the latest sequencing technology.

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.

Bye Bye Bluebells Bluebell woods, the dense carpets of violet–blue flowers found in ancient woodland are a spectacular and famous springtime sight in Britain, but this picture postcard scene is threatened as never before.

With everyone in a reflective mood as the year comes to a close, one of the big scientific trends of 2012 has obviously been the high profile that open-access and more open methods of carrying out science has received.