Taylor Noble As the ecology community expands, it is now adopting new ways of making sense of the plethora of data produced from diverse approaches, including ocean research, eco-genomics, limnology, and macrosystems ecology, through more integrative means – improving our understanding of biology in a broader sense.

Björn Grüning modelling one of our t-shirts. Nowadays, massive amounts of diverse data are generated in biomedical research. To manage it and extract useful information, bioinformatic solutions are needed and software must be developed. The development of a tool should always follow a similar process.

**Deep (ocean) sequencing. Big-(fish) data. **The ocean sunfish, must officially be one of the world’s weirdest creatures to enter the “genome club”, and have its genetic code mapped. Laying the most eggs of any other known vertebrate (up to 300,000,000 at a time), and starting out as the size of the head of a pin, sunfish grow to become to largest bony fish in the sea.

Gigascience this week published a high quality genome of the apple, the “golden delicious” variety, to be precise. Although a version of the Malus domestica genome has already been available, Xuewei Li et al .’s de novo assembly significantly improves on that previous ressource, using a healthy injection of long reads from third generation, “single-molecule” sequencing technology.

Building an open, community-supported, e-infrastructure for medical metabolomics data. The European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme is funding the PhenoMeNal (Phenome and Metabolome aNalysis) project that aims to support data processing and analysis pipelines for molecular phenotype data generated from metabolomics applications.

At Disney World infancy ends at 3, or at least that is the age children have to start purchasing tickets. It seemed appropriate to celebrate our 4th birthday there. Or at least at the #ISMB16 Computational Biology meeting that was held this week at the Walt Disney World Resort.

Join the Open Data club. Every year we catch up with fellow enthusiasts of open data, open source and open science at BOSC, the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference that is a Special Interest Group of the ISCB’s annual ISMB conference. This year there is an interesting juxtaposition with the location, being held at the Disney World resort in Orlando.

**Shallow Impact. Tis the season. **In case people didn’t know— the world of scientific publishing has seasons: There is the Inundation season, which starts in November as authors rush to submit their papers before the end of year. Then there is the Recovery season beginning in January as editors come back from holidays to tackle the glut.

Teams of scientists from Spain have published the first complete genome of the olive tree. The specimen sequenced is of the Spanish Farga variety, and is over 1,200 years old.

Following our announcement this month of a new collaboration and integration with protocols.io, we’ve gone into more detail on the first two papers that have utilised this open access repository of scientific methods and collaborative protocol-centered platform.

GigaScience recently published an article all about a Genotype Investigator for Genome-Wide Analyses, alternatively known as Gigwa. But what is this and how can it help? Guilhem Sempere explains more in a guest post. Exploring the structure of genomes and analyzing their evolution is essential to understanding the adaptation of organisms to biotic and abiotic environments.