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Individual human genomes are diploid in nature, with half of the homologous chromosomes derived from each parent. The context in which variations occur on each individual chromosome has profound effects on the action and clinical importance of the genes on it, but this “haplotype” information has been mostly ignored in genomics research to date. A wealth of new data released from the Personal Genome Project via a new Data Note helps fill this gap by releasing the largest set of high coverage whole human genome assemblies with experimentally determined haplotypes to date.

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Here is a Q&A with the first author of our first camera trap dataset published in our Data-Intensive Ecology series. Taylor shares his thoughts on why he’s so interested in the endangered blunt-nosed leopard lizard, the usefulness of camera traps in ecology, as well as challenges with big data.

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The Galaxy community is one that shares similar reproducibility goals with GigaScience, having a computational platform that allows users to share workflows, histories and wrapped computational tools in an easy-to-use and open source interface. Björn Grüning and The Intergalactic Utilities Commission of Galaxy have a guest posting here to announce new changes that will make development and presentation of tools and pipelines through Galaxy even more reproducible and usable.

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The genome of the ocean sunfish (Mola mola), the world’s largest bony fish, has been just been published in GigaScience by researchers at A*STAR, Singapore, and China National Genebank. Here we talk to the researchers, including Nobel Laureate Sydney Brenner, on how the project came together, the slightly unusual sample collection, and how hope this work helps to provide insight into the fish’s extraordinary growth rate and unique body shape.

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The latest apple launch event is not for a new mobile phone or tablet, but in this case a new, much improved reference genome. Just published is a new “long-read” golden delicious genome, and Hans Zauner (the latest addition to the GigaScience team) explains why it is important.

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David Johnson and the PhenoMeNal consortium have a guest posting on their efforts in building an open, community-supported, e-infrastructure for medical metabolomics data, and how they are seeking community feedback on the requirements for the data infrastructures needed.

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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. Here we report on what happened and how we and the field have been growing up

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The 2016 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference has just finished here at Disney World Orlando, and here is the write up of the meeting, with discussion on the merits of open bioinformatics and closed cartoons.

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Our Editor in Chief Laurie Goodman gives her thoughts on the journal impact factor (jIF), and how we need to move beyond shallow, untransparent, gameable, out-of-date proxies that promote bad scientific practices.

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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. This work will facilitate genetic improvement for production of olives and olive oil, two key products in the Mediterranean economy and diet.

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