*As a journal focussed on open science we are big promoters of research parasites (and research on parasites), and try to feeds them with open data and tools. It is therefore appropriate this is the second year GigaScience has supported and sponsored the Research Parasite awards.

Sequencers versus the smugglers. CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), is one of the largest and oldest conservation and sustainable use agreements in existence, and provides a legal framework for protecting endangered plants and animals around the world.

With the current annual data creation rate estimated to be in the tens of zettabytes, the flood of information currently being generated in every area of human life is crashing up against limited data storage solutions. However, DNA, which serves as a storage system for biological information, has been proposed as a potential means to store an unlimited amount of information.

Every summer we celebrate our birthday at the ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference, and this was a particularly memorable and important one – being the 5 ^th birthday of GigaScience, and 25 ^th edition of the ISMB. Having ISMB in Prague this year, the historic capital of old Bohemia was particularly appreciated by the attendees, both for its beautiful baroque streets, and its reputation as a

GigaScience is always trying to push the boundaries of how we disseminate reproducible research, and to adapt to the challenges of dealing with experiments become more data-intensive.

**Call for Submissions – Win Prizes and Join us in Shenzhen for ICG-12 ** Being co-published by BGI and based at their Hong Kong office we are regular participants at their yearly ICG (International Conference on Genomics) conference in Shenzhen. Since the very first meeting in 2006, ICG has grown to become one of the most influential annual meetings in ‘omics’ research, and is now in its 12th edition.

A high coverage, high quality genome sequence of the butterfly Bicyclus anynana is published today in GigaScience . B. anynana , the squinting bush brown, is a fascinating model species that can modify its morphology in response to environmental clues.

Passiflora , commonly known as Passion Vines or Passion Flowers is a genus encompassing around 500 species, all of which exhibit such huge variation in leaf shape.  To further understand the unique diversity of Passiflora leaves, a recent paper published in GigaScience , presents a morphometric analysis and unique open dataset encompassing over 3,300 leaves from 40 different Passiflora species.

While the Guardians of the Galaxy film franchise has just released its second film, the GigaScience Galaxy series has just published its 10 ^th , 11 ^th and 12 ^th papers.

Authors can now submit their bioRxiv preprints directly to GigaScience via the biorXiv platform, at the push of a button. This handy technical integration is another hallmark of biology preprints becoming a normal, accepted, and speedy way of communicating research results. Pre-prints, versions of a scholarly paper that precede formal publication in a peer-reviewed journal are  becoming increasingly mainstream.

The decline of global honeybee populations are a major environment concern, because of their vital role in our food systems and pollination of flowering plants. Twenty first century ’Omics is coming to the rescue, and published in GigaScience this week is an article that presents the genome and proteome of a mahor threat to bee colonies, the parasitic mite, Tropilaelaps mercedesae.