Take a ride down chromosome highways with a novel web-based platform that allows sharing of private genetic data while maintaining privacy through a colourful dynamic visualization tool. The Human Genome Project offered new hope that discovering the genetic determinants which mediate chronic disease susceptibility would lead to new avenues for drug development and targeted therapy, yet over decade later the is disappointment

Using big data to understand the tree of life New work just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and GigaScience reveals important details about key transitions in the evolution of plant life on our planet, and present a huge cache of computational results, data and tools for plant biologists.

**The Ebola pandemic presents one of the most terrifying world health crises in modern times, with devastating consequences in Western Africa [as this goes to press there are now over 10,000 infections and almost 5,000 deaths]. There is a vast amount of data on this crisis available in rapidly published articles and on the internet (check out PLOS Currents: Outbreaks in particular), including past and current numbers of infected;

Here we present a guest blog by our Editorial Board Member Russell Poldrack, Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, who highlights the challenges and opportunities surrounding imaging data to enable the neuroscience community to “stand on the shoulders of giants”, and an announcement on our new fMRI series. The sharing of neuroimaging data is an idea whose time has finally come, but many challenges remain.

Despite the precipitous drop in the price of DNA sequencing, global credit crunches have shrunk the science budgets able to properly take advantage of this. At least in the case of non-medical research.

The 2014 International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB) was hosted in Australia’s most livable city and event, sport, culture and food capital – that is Melbourne, with GigaScience being proud to be one of the media partners.

Data Club is Gonna Show You How As science is supposed to be about “standing on the shoulders of giants”, we all know sharing scientific data should be a good thing, but there are obviously large technical and cultural challenges holding things back.

Boston 2014: More than a (Bioinformatics) Feeling Following from our previous posting on BOSC, our birthday and the BMC Open Data award party in Boston, on top of having to dash between the many great talks and sessions at ISMB, we were kept even busier than usual helping to organize and present in a special Beyond-the-PDF inspired “What Bioinformaticians need to know about digital publishing beyond the PDF” workshop at the end

Shedding light on what the Optical Mapping System can provide for genome analysis, here we present a guest posting from optical mapping pioneer and developer (and GigaScience Editorial Board Member), David C. Schwartz, who is a Professor of Chemistry and Genetics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ** Taking the Google Maps approach: providing comprehensive, scalable worldviews** We use maps in our daily lives to

Birthdays are always emotional. The GigaScience team are on their way back from the always jam packed ISMB meeting and its satellite SIGs. This year was a particularly event filled one, with our second birthday, the BMC open data award and drinks reception, and our “What Bioinformaticians need to know about digital publishing beyond the PDF2” workshop all falling during the meeting.

A paper published in Nature Biotechnology today reveals the most comprehensive catalogue of genes in any single microbiome to date. While the roughly 20,000 genes in the human genome have been available for over a decade, the gene catalogue of the microbiome, our much larger “other genome” has to date been much more poorly understood and characterized.