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

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.