View towards the National Wine Centre of Australia (conference venue) from the Adelaide Botanic Garden Having just attended our first plant phenomics conference – it was great to learn how far the field has progressed and how rapidly it continues to progress with the advancement of new technologies for high-throughput phenotyping.

Navigating Pangenome’s Labyrinth In the two decades since the first genomes were sequenced, with the exponential growth of new and closely related genomes it has become increasingly difficult to visualise and compare their structure. Particularly with the large diversity and difference in genes within microbial genomes.

Photo: UNSW Sydney The cane toad Rhinella marina is native to Central and South America. But thanks to humans and the sugar cane trade, the species now thrives also in Australia and other places where it doesn’t belong. The invasive species comes with an unpleasant surprise for native Australian predators, such as snakes or freshwater crocodiles: R. marina kills them with its toxic secretions.

Monkey Microbiome Business Research just out in GigaScience introduces the macaque monkey to the microbial gene catalogue club, joining other important model organisms including the (also recently published in GigaScience) Rat, Mouse, Pig and Cow.

With the upcoming 5th International Plant Phenotyping Symposium (IPPS) set to take place Oct 2-5, in Adelaide, Australia, we look at how the plant phenotyping community has progressed over the last decade and how we can potentially address the issues surrounding data sharing, re-use, and reproducible research. As we live in an increasingly data-driven era, the genomics community has, in particular, a long history of sharing data to

**Web tools and FAIR principles at the core of Life Science publishing in GigaDB ** As we continue to push the envelope for publishing in the life sciences we have been listening to our users about the things that should be incorporated into the publication process.

Due to popular demand we are keeping the paper submission deadline of our ICG prize track open until the end of the month. We’ve already received more submissions than our first competition last year, and a number of other submitters have been putting their finish touches to submission.

Open Science Trek, The Next Integration Fostering and promoting more open and transparent science is one of the goals of GigaScience , and to do this we have been big promoters of open peer review as well as preprints servers. Combining both of these, Academic Karma was the one of the first platforms to focus on open review of preprints, and has helped facilitate this over the past 3 years.

Call for Submissions – Win Prizes and Join us in Shenzhen for ICG-13 Being co-published by BGI we are regular participants at their yearly ICG (International Conference on Genomics) conference in Shenzhen. Since the very first meeting in 2006, ICG has grown to become one of the most influential annual meetings in ‘omics’ research, and is now in its 13th edition.

We at GigaScience are pleased to have won the 2018 the PROSE Award for Innovation in Journal Publishing in the multidisciplinary category, as innovation has been a key element in our goal to change how scientific publishing is done. The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has been giving awards for 42 years to recognize distinguished professional and scholarly books, reference works, journals.