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

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

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.

Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) A key to understanding life at the molecular level is based on accurate protein annotation at the functional level.

As the GigaScience journal moves from strength-to-strength, with that comes the expansion of the editorial and data management teams that are now spanning three continents – and what better way to meet than at the 8th International Conference on Genomics (ICG8) in Shenzhen, China, co-organised by the BGI and GigaScience. Held at the Thunderbirdsesque Vanke International Conference Centre in the popular seaside resort of

Open Science flourishes at BOSC and ISMB It’s been a busy couple of weeks for GigaScience , with our 1st birthday, publication of a special anniversary print issue sponsored by Aspera, and publication of the (unusually reviewed) Assemblathon2 paper. These all spanned and were coordinated with the ISMB meeting in Berlin, the yearly gathering of the computational biology community.

Biggest ever contest to put genome assemblers through their paces If you haven’t caught it yet, the largest systematic assessment the process of genome assembly carried out to date has been published this week in GigaScience . The second Assemblathon competition saw 21 teams submit 43 entries based on data from three different unassembled parrot, cichlid fish, and boa constrictor genomes sequenced using three different

**Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA)**To tie in with the upcoming Automated Function Prediction Special Interest Group (AFP-SIG) at the ISMB/ECCB 2013 meeting in Berlin, GigaScience and the organisers are launching a call for submissions to a thematic series of research from the meeting and beyond

In the midst of a busy few weeks of European meetings, GigaScience is currently in Basel, where ECCB 2012 (the European Conference of Computational Biology) has just ended. Usually overshadowed by its bigger sibling: the ISMB (particularly when both meetings are in Europe and co-hosted), this was the first time that I had attended the stand-alone meeting and it more than justified being a stand-alone event.