The use of “big data” genomics technologies may gather most attention and funding in “big money” settings such as healthcare and agriculture, but due to a precipitous drop in cost its use has become increasingly ubiquitous in all corners of biological research, including biodiversity research and conservation.

The current global panic about Zika is a “data gap“ issue: a vacuum of information due to gaps in understanding of its spread and pathogenesis, and gaps in sharing the research data and specimens that will enable the global research community to keep one step ahead of the disease spread.

**The Giga-Curation Challenge 2016 **Annotation and curation are under appreciated parts of scholarship, because they allow someone to provide additional insight into a work, and are needed for efficient and easy re-use.

**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.

Last Christmas we gave you our heart; okay forget George Michael – we gave you beautiful imaging data sets, Virtual Machines, BYO data parties, GigaGitHub, more open peer review plus much more.

Despite the precipitous drop in the price of DNA sequencing, global credit crunches have tightened the science budgets able to properly take advantage of the potential of genomics. While this plummet in cost has led to an explosion of “mega-sequencing” projects carried out by large international consortia, it has also democratized and empowered what can be done outside traditional academia and research funding environments.

“ To enable a conversation over the world’s knowledge ” is the slogan for Hypothes.is, a open annotation layer that allows anyone to annotate anything.

Seek and Deploy. If you’re a user of GigaDB (and why wouldn’t you be!) you’ll perhaps have been wondering why the search function is so slow and often missing obvious results! Well even if you’re not wondering, I can tell you that this has now been fixed.

**Pregnant Starfish go Big Data. **Brittle stars are a class of organisms that are closely related to starfish. While most members of this group reproduce externally, there are some species that develop their young internally and ‘give birth’ to live young.

**The Human Genetics Massive: #ASHG15 in Baltimore ** This week the human genetics “tribe” (as NIH Director Francis Collins referred to “his people” here) have muscled out the Eastside and Westside crews to take over the Baltimore waterfront for the yearly American Society of Human Genetics (#ASHG15) meeting.