ICSB 2011 left me with a greater than ever appreciation for, to borrow from the title of the last plenary session, the complexity of life. I was impressed by the increasingly complex and explanative models that are being built, and faster and more detailed imaging methods under development, not to mention the exciting new applications of systems biology for disease treatment.I am sure I’m not the only one who feels this way.

As those of you who have been paying attention well know, I am currently attending this year’s International Conference on Systems Biology (#ICSB) meeting in either Heidelberg or Mannheim (there’s ongoing debate about the meeting locale). The meeting opened yesterday with a plenary talk by Jean Peccoud talking about DNA “grammar,” making linguistic models of yeast cell cycle regularly network genetics, and the open source application (with a

Our busy summer on the road continues, with further globetrotting to meet authors and collaborators, get the message about GigaScience out, and hopefully at the end of it get some papers. This week Laurie and Scott will be at the Datacite meeting in Berkeley, meeting the people helping us to produce our data-DOIs, learning about where data-citation is going, and also doing a short presentation. As always check our twitter