*The field of synthetic biology, designing and building engineered biological systems through DNA synthesis and genetic engineering, is rapidly moving to a genome scale. In a similar trajectory to genomic sequencing and genome projects two decades ago, it has moved from engineering single genes, entire synthetic bacterial genomes (J Craig Venter’s notorious “Synthia”), to the eukaryotic organism stage.

Following from his guest blog in October on “Approaches and resources to slow the spread of infection”, Michael Dean from the Center of Cancer Research at the NIH uses his data oriented approach to give an update of where the Ebola epidemic is. While there may be less media coverage (apart from in the UK), this doesn’t relate to the situation on the ground.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

When it comes to technology, GigaScience has always been open and willing to embrace new ways of integrating technology in its publishing processes, with the ultimate goal of working towards more reproducible, interactive and executable papers.

Sheer Heart Attack Diagnosis is key to beginning treatment for preventing coronary heart disease, the most common cause of heart attacks. One useful tool in the fight against this leading killer is magnetic resonance imaging, which allows the direct examination of blood flow to the myocardium of the heart.

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.