The International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) hosted their Neuroinformatics Assembly on 19 ^th -23 ^rd April 2021. This conference aims to highlight open innovation in neuroscience, and additionally to showcase recently developed software tools and data infrastructures.

The dizzying complexity of biological systems necessitates an abundance of tools that allow researchers to understand the deluge of sequence, structural, and systems-level data that is being generated in cell, molecular, and developmental biology.

This week in GigaScience we published research revealing a previously hidden diversity of symbiotic bacteria from the genus Rickettsia , spanning a wide range of arthropod hosts. Using accidentally amplified sequence data from a barcoding database as a starting point, the results will help to better understand the co-evolution of these intimate symbioses.

Open Data in the Third Dimension Data are not just ephemeral units of magnetisation sitting on computer hard drives. The linking of the word to storable computer information only goes back to the mid-20 ^th century, but the use of the latin word data in English goes back to at least the 17 ^th Century.

Following our efforts promoting open science and “community genomics” projects that have included the “Peoples Parrot” , community cactus, and our very own Bauhinia Genome, today we have a guest posting from the Transbiome team.

GigaScience Press and River Valley Technologies, with the help of Stencila, launch their first interactive “ Executable Research Article ” from their new scientific journal, GigaByte.

The SAMtools suite of tools for manipulating sequencing data one of the most ubiquitous tools in bioinformatics, as the “glue” holding together much of bioinformatics we see it used in pretty much every genomics pipeline we are submitted.

The International Ukraine Genetic Diversity Project finds a quarter of the genetic variation in Europe, dramatically increasing information on population diversity and medical genetic variation. Today, the largest study of genetic diversity in Ukraine was published in GigaScience . The project was an international effort, bringing together researchers in Ukraine, the US and China and is the first fruits of this collaboration to

Today is a big day for the genomics of egg-laying animals, with the coordinated publication of three papers on animal sex chromosome evolution and diversity in GigaScience , Nature , and Genome Research by the Qi Zhou lab at Zhejiang University.

Cell Bio 2020 Virtual – the online ASCB|EMBO Meeting – took place on 2-16 December 2020 and offered many invaluable insights on the structural and evolutionary basis of biological systems.