“Extinction is forever – so our action must be immediate.” – Sir David Attenborough, Sept 30 ^th 2020 Biodiversity Genomics 2020 aimed to bring together researchers across the world to celebrate the global achievement in genome sequencing in an effort to “sequence life for the future of life”. This was a virtual conference that took place on 5 ^th -9 ^th September 2020 and the GigaScienc e team

Diversity, Ancestry, and the Tenacious Concept of Race The Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) is a policy-framing and technical standards-setting organization, seeking to enable responsible genomic data sharing within a human rights framework.

Montréal was the venue for Medical Imaging with Deep Learning 2020 (MIDL 2020) that took place on 6-9 July 2020. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, like many meetings this year (such as the ISMB conference we attend every year), the new normal has been to make it a virtual conference.

As publishers of a lot of plant and animal genomes, the biggest conference for this research community is the appropriately named Plant and Animal Genome Conference (PAG). We’ve attended a number of these giant meetings in their San Diego base, and in recent years they have been branching out to host satellites in Asia (PAG Asia, which last year included a workshop that we participated in). And we attended the 28 ^th edition of the

This is the last blog post of 2019 and it is time again to look back at some of the amazing research published in GigaScience over the past year. Besides handling manuscripts, reviews and data, the editors and curators also attended conferences near and far, they contributed to policy discussions and prepared the launch of a new journal, GigaByte. More about all these activities below.

The Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington DC was the venue for this year’s ASCB|EMBO 2019 Meeting that took place on 7-11 December 2019. The American Society of Cell Biology conference, now merged with the EMBO meeting, is the largest yearly gathering for the cell imaging community, and GigaScience has attended in the past.

EMBL Heidelberg was the venue for the EMBL Symposium: Seeing is Believing – Imaging the Molecular Processes of Life that took place on 9-12 October 2019. This was the second EMBL meeting on imaging data we attending this year after VIZBI (see the write-up here), GigaScience Data Scientist Chris Armit was there and was astonished at how recent breakthroughs in imaging technology are enlightening our understanding of the Life Sciences.

The view from the Marie Sklodowska Curie Museum, where Marie lived as a child. This year’s Neuroinformatics 2019 meeting took place in the beautiful and historic city of Warszawa (Warsaw). Warszawa remains a pilgrimage city for scientists, with arguably its most famous resident Marie Sklodowska Curie being the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, and the only person ever to win the Nobel Prize twice in two different scientific fields.

In Sultry Switzerland, Bioinformatics is Radiant at ISMBECCB Water cooling of our datacenter (& friends) Regular readers will know GigaScience originally launched at the 2012 ISMB (Intelligent Systems of Molecular Biology) meeting in Long Beach, and every subsequent year the conference has held a special place in our hearts as the place where we celebrate our birthday (see all the previous write-ups in GigaBlog).

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