Earlier this year I stopped over in Singapore, home of the spectacular "supertrees" in the Garden by the Bay. The trip was a holiday, but I spent a good part of one day visiting Rudolf Meier's group at the National University of Singapore. Chatting with Rudolf was great fun, he's opinionated and not afraid to share those opinions with anyone who will listen. Belatedly I've finally written up some of the topics we discussed.

Gigascience this week published a high quality genome of the apple, the “golden delicious” variety, to be precise. Although a version of the Malus domestica genome has already been available, Xuewei Li et al .’s de novo assembly significantly improves on that previous ressource, using a healthy injection of long reads from third generation, “single-molecule” sequencing technology.

We at GigaScience always appreciate good press, and on top of the welcome coverage on blogs (e.g. this in Annals of Botany) and twitter, we are pleased with the profile of the journal in this months Bio-IT world (especially coming on top of the coverage of our database in the previous issue). The article is a nice introduction to the editors, editorial policies, and hopes for the journal, and is useful reading for those who’d