The Leader of the Curation Pack. At GigaScience we are keen to maximise the use and utility of our published data, narrative and other research objects.

The great responsibility Every discipline of science is unique.  Ecology is no exception.  We work in diverse, complex, context-dependent systems. Global change and anthropogenic influences are very real issues for the health of the planet that ecologists often examine.  As a discipline, we have moved from context-dependent, local studies to much larger, integrated studies.

A new portrait of Obama shows a spineless, slimy, gutter dweller, and in GigaScience today we give you unprecedented insight into what makes them tick. Don’t worry, we haven’t encroached upon Fox News to provide partisan political commentary for the US elections, we are talking about the Obama genus of leaf-shaped Planerians from South America.

In support of Brain Awareness Week, we have asked Cameron Craddock, Director of the Computational NeuroImaging Lab, Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and Director of Imaging, Child Mind Institute, to write a blog highlighting open science in neuroimaging, and to announce our upcoming publication of the 2015 Brainhack Proceedings and the Brainhack Thematic Series.

The genomics community has been held up as an exemplar in data sharing practices since the human genome project, but the metabolomics community is catching up fast, with the Metabolights database being the fast growing repository at the EBI.

The use of “big data” genomics technologies may gather most attention and funding in “big money” settings such as healthcare and agriculture, but due to a precipitous drop in cost its use has become increasingly ubiquitous in all corners of biological research, including biodiversity research and conservation.

The current global panic about Zika is a “data gap“ issue: a vacuum of information due to gaps in understanding of its spread and pathogenesis, and gaps in sharing the research data and specimens that will enable the global research community to keep one step ahead of the disease spread.

**The Giga-Curation Challenge 2016 **Annotation and curation are under appreciated parts of scholarship, because they allow someone to provide additional insight into a work, and are needed for efficient and easy re-use.

**OPTIMising Genome Assembly **This month brings new additions to our exciting and on-going Optical Mapping series. Outside of a handful of key genomes, due to deficiencies in the short sequencing read lengths that have backed genome assembly, we lack reference genomes that are finished to high standards that can support comprehensive analyses.

Last Christmas we gave you our heart; okay forget George Michael – we gave you beautiful imaging data sets, Virtual Machines, BYO data parties, GigaGitHub, more open peer review plus much more.

Despite the precipitous drop in the price of DNA sequencing, global credit crunches have tightened the science budgets able to properly take advantage of the potential of genomics. While this plummet in cost has led to an explosion of “mega-sequencing” projects carried out by large international consortia, it has also democratized and empowered what can be done outside traditional academia and research funding environments.