Painting of the Eastern Yellow Robin by Prof Paul Sunnucks. Today in Gigascience we published an avian genome assembly with a twist. An Australian team at Monash University discovered unusual, so-called neo-sex chromosomes in the genome of the Eastern Yellow Robin. Being big fans of bird genomes (see our support of the Avian Phylogenomic and B10K projects) it is great to see another one take flight.

**In Sultry Switzerland, Bioinformatics is Radiant at ISMBECCB ** Water cooling of our datacenter (&

In this data-driven era, research is faced with new challenges, from sharing, storing and accessing data, including how to better integrate data to answer big questions in science. With many data repositories available, it is hard to maintain them all – some repositories are forced to close – meaning loss of access to invaluable datasets.

Photograph by Giang-Son Nguyen (SINTEF) The Norwegian city of Trondheim seemed the place to be this June – with hotels in high demand

Adapted from Ohdera A et al. Three jellyfish genomes are better than one A new article in GigaScience might make you squirm if you plan to hit the beach this summer. The published work presents the draft genomes of three different jellyfish species.

Regular readers will know GigaScience has published a lot of plant and animal genomes, and the biggest conference for this research community is the appropriately named Plant &

In the data driven era, not only in research but in our day-to-day lives, people are creating more and more personal digitized data that enables human-participant research in social sciences and personalized medicine. However, with numerous data streams and types this raises concerns such as how to merge and share such data, as well as ethical problems.

At GigaScience as our focus is on reproducibility rather than subjective impact, it can be challenging at times to judge this in our papers. Targeting the “bleeding edge” of data-driven research, more and more of our papers utilise technologies, such as Jupyter notebooks, Virtual Machines, and Containers such as Docker.

The 21st meeting of the Genomics Standards Consortium (GSC21) took place last week in Vienna at one of the oldest universities in the world – the University of Vienna – from May 20th-23rd.  We’ve been long time supporters and participants of the Genomics Standards Consortium meetings going back to 2012’s GSC13 in Shenzhen, and have also published a special series of GSC “Best Practice in Genomics Research” papers.

Just out in GigaScience is a new paper presenting Rice Galaxy, an open resource for plant science using the Galaxy workflow management system we are so fond of. The authors from the International Rice Research Institute in the Phillipines are winners of our 2018 ICG13 Prize, and as this is the final paper to be published we can now present a summary of the  competition.