The Penguin Genome Consortium sequences all living penguin species genomes to understand the evolution of life on the ice. Published today in GigaScience is an article that presents the first effort to capture the entirety of the genomic landscape of all living penguin species.

While they say one swallow doesn’t make a spring, one swallow genome makes a welcome contribution to the avian genome club. Taking advantage of the latest genomic and optical mapping technologies, a team of Scientists from the University of Milan, California State Polytechnic University and the University of Pavia, have carried out the high quality sequencing of the barn swallow genome, published today in Gigascience.

**Bird Genomes Rule the Roost **Yesterday marked the announcement by Guojie Zhang (pictured) in Nature of the launch of the Bird 10,000 genomes (B10K) project (see: http://b10k.genomics.cn/), an initiative to generate representative draft genome sequences from all bird species within the next five years. This ambitious project is the first attempt to sequence the genomes of all living species of a vertebrate class.