Researchers have sequenced the venomous Solenodon, the last survivor of a branch of mammals that appeared at the time of the dinosaurs.

*A New High-Quality Reindeer Genome Sequence Provides Resources for Studying Evolution, Domestication, and Adaptation to Arctic Climate. But not the secrets of Christmas. * Ewan Birney has previously blogged on the Genome Days of Christmas, but today the full-text version of a particularly Christmassy species has just been published to add to that list.

Not many tree species are iconic enough to have inspired Goethe love poems, but the distinctive and beautiful heart shaped leaves of ginkgo have made it a popular symbol in art and design. Coming from East Asia and having a long association with Buddhist temples and parks in China, Korea and Japan, it was thought to be extinct in the wild and only in more recent times were small wild populations identified in mountain groves in South West China.

**Deep (ocean) sequencing. Big-(fish) data. **The ocean sunfish, must officially be one of the world’s weirdest creatures to enter the “genome club”, and have its genetic code mapped. Laying the most eggs of any other known vertebrate (up to 300,000,000 at a time), and starting out as the size of the head of a pin, sunfish grow to become to largest bony fish in the sea.

**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.

We want you to use our stuff We get many queries regarding the policies and licenses associated with our content and supporting data, and as our co-publishers BioMed Central have just announced the migration of their licenses (including ours) to the newly released version 4.0 of the creative commons CC-BY attribution license, we thought it would be a good opportunity to clarify our policies in an easier to understand manner than

A lot has already been written about last months Assemblathon2 paper in GigaScience (see the growing list of articles here), but for the box-set completists interested in squeezing every last bit of insight into the project and how it was put together, there was a lot of additional material left over from the recent Biome Q&A with Keith Bradnam that we thought it could be useful to post in a (hopefully final) blog posting.

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