Out this week in GigaScience is a new monitoring tool empowering infectious disease detectives. Scientists in Cambodia, who are supported by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, used the new IDseq tool to help confirm and sequence the whole genome of the country’s first case of COVID-19. Read more here.

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Biodiversity Genomics 2020 was a virtual event aiming to bring together researchers across the world to “sequence life for the future of life”, sequencing all of the corners of the tree of life.

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Diversity, Ancestry, and the Tenacious Concept of Race The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is a policy-framing and technical standards-setting organization, seeking to enable responsible genomic data sharing within a human rights framework.

GigaScience has spawned a new smaller and more agile sibling: GigaByte, and is the first journal to come from our new GigaScience Press.

Q&A with Michael Fire talking about scientometric trends for coronaviruses and other infectious diseases, looking at why this research can "go viral"

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Meetings In the Time of Coronavirus: Conferences go Viral June-July usually marks peak conference season when the GigaScience team is on the road, but with the COVID-19 pandemic shutting down travel and public gatherings it has been a strangely static summer.

Montréal was the venue for Medical Imaging with Deep Learning 2020 (MIDL 2020) that took place on 6-9 July 2020. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, like many meetings this year (such as the ISMB conference we attend every year), the new normal has been to make it a virtual conference.

Bats are mammals like no other – airborne, mostly nocturnal, often hidden away in caves, capable of using echolocation for in-flight navigation. No two bat species are alike, however. Their diversity of morphology, life styles and feeding habits is staggering. New bat genomics research published today in GigaScience explores

C19RapidReview: cross publisher collaboration against the coronavirus pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new urgency to openly and rapidly share and review relevant research, with the world looking to science to solve the problems we currently face. While we’ve written about constructive things you can do while in lockdown, there are many more things you can’t do while locked out of the lab.

It’s DNA day, celebrating two historic milestones: The publication of the structure of DNA in 1953, and the completion of the human genome project in 2003.

***With ongoing the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic providing us with unprecedented insight into the progression of a disease outbreak, and unprecedented time in the lock down to turn us all into armchair epidemiologists. This includes near real-time sharing and analysis of genomics data through platforms like nextstrain, and of ways to view the infection, mortality and testing statistics via a growing number of online dashboards.