The genomics community has been held up as an exemplar in data sharing practices since the human genome project, but the metabolomics community is catching up fast, with the Metabolights database being the fast growing repository at the EBI.

**OPTIMising Genome Assembly **This month brings new additions to our exciting and on-going Optical Mapping series. Outside of a handful of key genomes, due to deficiencies in the short sequencing read lengths that have backed genome assembly, we lack reference genomes that are finished to high standards that can support comprehensive analyses.

While for much of its history since the great famine of the eighteenth century Ireland has been synonymous with mass emigration, the 23 ^rd ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) meeting sailing into the regenerated “Silicon Docks” of Dublin last week was a homecoming of sorts for the annual gathering of the global Bioinformatics community.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

Take a ride down chromosome highways with a novel web-based platform that allows sharing of private genetic data while maintaining privacy through a colourful dynamic visualization tool. The Human Genome Project offered new hope that discovering the genetic determinants which mediate chronic disease susceptibility would lead to new avenues for drug development and targeted therapy, yet over decade later the is disappointment

The 2014 International Conference on Systems Biology (ICSB) was hosted in Australia’s most livable city and event, sport, culture and food capital – that is Melbourne, with GigaScience being proud to be one of the media partners.

Data Club is Gonna Show You How As science is supposed to be about “standing on the shoulders of giants”, we all know sharing scientific data should be a good thing, but there are obviously large technical and cultural challenges holding things back.

Editors: Mark Wass (University of Kent, UK), Iddo Friedberg (Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, USA), Predrag Radivojac (Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA) A key to understanding life at the molecular level is based on accurate protein annotation at the functional level.

As the GigaScience journal moves from strength-to-strength, with that comes the expansion of the editorial and data management teams that are now spanning three continents – and what better way to meet than at the 8th International Conference on Genomics (ICG8) in Shenzhen, China, co-organised by the BGI and GigaScience. Held at the Thunderbirdsesque Vanke International Conference Centre in the popular seaside resort of

Open Science flourishes at BOSC and ISMB It’s been a busy couple of weeks for GigaScience , with our 1st birthday, publication of a special anniversary print issue sponsored by Aspera, and publication of the (unusually reviewed) Assemblathon2 paper. These all spanned and were coordinated with the ISMB meeting in Berlin, the yearly gathering of the computational biology community.