The precipitous drop in the price of next generation sequencing coupled with its increasing sensitivity has opened up whole new areas of research, one of the most interesting in recent years being the advent of single-cell sequencing. Combining advances in flow-sorting of cells, whole genome amplification and the latest sequencing technologies is now allowing researchers to study tumor evolution on a single-cell level.

Scientific workflow software such as Taverna, Knime and Pipeline Pilot can overcome interoperability issues relating to the access of tools and data format conversions. Such tasks are automatically handled by the data processing pipeline during its enactment by the workflow software. Galaxy is another workflow system, and its annual conference was held last month at the University of Chicago.

Type any scientific term into any search engine and its pretty much guaranteed that a Wikipedia article will be the first hit.

This year is the “Year of Neuroscience” in Spain. As a part of this educational movement and celebration of the most recent flowering of Spanish neuroscience, Barcelona hosted the FENS Forum of Neuroscience. Drawing what the Chair of the Host Committee, Mara Dierssen, described as the largest number of attendees ever, the 8 ^th FENS meeting fostered cross-disciplinary discussion and showcased some of the field’s best science.

As a project with the aim of revolutionizing data dissemination and use, on top of promoting open-access and open-data, open-source is a key part of the open-science equation, and this week GigaScience has been at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC2012 – program here) in Long Beach.

Research papers have been the predominant form of scholarly communication for the past few centuries, and despite moves towards online publication and open access, the process and structure of publication has not fundamentally changed in that time.

Readers of this blog will be well versed on our and others work using DataCite Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to cite data, and this months DataCite summer meeting in Copenhagen was a good opportunity to take stock of the many recent developments in the area of data publication, with the last six months being particularly busy with the number of new data platforms and data journals announced.

In a busy summer for meetings, this month we attended and presented at Bio-IT World Asia conference in Singapore. In this era of more globalized biology, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the usually Boston based conference series, with Bio-IT World substituted their usual New England lobster for Chili Crab and heading east.

I was fortunate in being able to attend 18th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM2012). It was a nice turnout, especially considering the long distances many of the attendees traveled to attend the conference in Beijing. Very exciting was the record number of Chinese delegates, a trend the organization would like to see continue in the future.

A correspondence we have contributed to has just been published in the BMC Research Notes “Data standardization, sharing and publication series” on the adventures in data-citation and data-release practices surrounding the Sorghum genome that is available in our GigaDB database and that was published last year in Genome Biology . We use Sorghum as an example to highlight the issues surrounding data release and use strong words,

With genetics and genomics being complicated enough, epigenomics adds even more layers of control and regulation of gene expression, and high-throughput global analyses of epigenetic changes further add to the reams of biological information many people are already referring to as the “data-deluge”.