Sequencers versus the smugglers. CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), is one of the largest and oldest conservation and sustainable use agreements in existence, and provides a legal framework for protecting endangered plants and animals around the world.

A high coverage, high quality genome sequence of the butterfly Bicyclus anynana is published today in GigaScience . B. anynana , the squinting bush brown, is a fascinating model species that can modify its morphology in response to environmental clues.

Passiflora , commonly known as Passion Vines or Passion Flowers is a genus encompassing around 500 species, all of which exhibit such huge variation in leaf shape.  To further understand the unique diversity of Passiflora leaves, a recent paper published in GigaScience , presents a morphometric analysis and unique open dataset encompassing over 3,300 leaves from 40 different Passiflora species.

While the Guardians of the Galaxy film franchise has just released its second film, the GigaScience Galaxy series has just published its 10 ^th , 11 ^th and 12 ^th papers.

The decline of global honeybee populations are a major environment concern, because of their vital role in our food systems and pollination of flowering plants. Twenty first century ‘Omics is coming to the rescue, and published in GigaScience this week is an article that presents the genome and proteome of a mahor threat to bee colonies, the parasitic mite, Tropilaelaps mercedesae.

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.

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.

At Disney World infancy ends at 3, or at least that is the age children have to start purchasing tickets. It seemed appropriate to celebrate our 4th birthday there. Or at least at the #ISMB16 Computational Biology meeting that was held this week at the Walt Disney World Resort.

Teams of scientists from Spain have published the first complete genome of the olive tree. The specimen sequenced is of the Spanish Farga variety, and is over 1,200 years old.