Genome Biology is very pleased to announce the Guest Editors of our special issue on the RBPome as John Rinn and Jernej Ule. The issue will be published in late 2013.

RNA binding proteins and their recognition elements within the transcriptome
The issue will focus on RNA binding proteins (RBPs), and the RNA molecules and motifs to which they bind: it is this RNA landscape, sculpted by RBPs, that we believe to be a particularly exciting and fast-moving area of research at the present time.

Or, as John puts it: "Almost all RNA genes function through protein interactions - with the ongoing explosion of RNA genes …

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One of the most wonderful things about science, to my mind, is the way its fundamental principles are simultaneously both universal and personal. Quantum physics helps to explain the nature of grandiose concepts such as time and space, but it also applies to the insignificant particles that make up my own cells. Equally, within these very cells, at any moment, biological processes newly reported in the literature are taking place, as are those that have yet to be discovered.

Life's secret
For this reason, when I look at one of the beautiful X-ray diffraction photos taken by Rosalind Franklin and her PhD student Ray Gosling in the early 1950s, from painstaking work performed on calf thymus samples in gloomy …

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Stand by for an important update on Genome Biology's highly anticipated, ultra-tricky, ultra-cool, *supreme* DNA60 Bioinformatics Challenge with a truly amazing prize…

Recently, we excited informatics enthusiasts with the prospect of a special Genome Biology Bioinformatics Challenge in honor of DNA60, but we were lamentably low on the detail. Here, we are putting that right.

So what is this Challenge all about then?
DNA60 celebrates the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of Watson and Crick's Double Helix, and Genome Biology will be marking the occasion, April 25th, with some special content. But we also wanted to have some fun, and to give away some prizes, so we decided to …

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Genome Biology is now inviting submissions for a special issue on "the RBPome". Advances in genomics have vastly improved our ability to investigate the cellular landscape of RNA-binding proteins (RBPs), and have uncovered a vast territory of gene regulation previously hidden from view. The interest in the RBPome that has arisen from these recent advances makes the topic a timely one, and we are confident that our special issue will stand out as an important contribution to this emerging field.

You might be wondering by now if we are guilty of 'badomics' when we use the term the RBPome? You be the judge – and we would welcome suggestions of whether there is a more succinct way to …

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February was an unexpectedly busy month for science. A mangy skeleton lying unceremoniously under a concrete parking lot was shown by forensic science to be no lesser a historical figure than the last Plantagenet King of England. To trump Richard III, a once-in-a-century meteor strike in Russia startled stargazers distracted by an asteroid flyby, in a coincidence that I have yet to see a p-value for. But in the genomics world, even stray royals and exploding space rocks cannot compete with the excitement of Florida's annual AGBT conference. In the words of Genome Biology's Editor Clare Garvey: "Rothberg describes a 'future-proof' machine. It's gotta be #agbt13". Yes, machines and the future, that pretty much …

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2012 was ominous in Genome Biology parlance: the dreaded 'Volume 13'. But, happily, our luck remained in good order as we saw our Impact Factor soar to 9.04, while our publications  continued to intrigue, inform and enthuse our readership.

January opened the year with a human population genetics flavor, courtesy of studies on the Amhara and Ashkenazi Jews, and also provided the popular Uberon cross-species anatomy ontology with a home in the scientific record.

In February, the software title 'All Your Base' was finally claimed by the Bioinformatics community, following 12 years of missed opportunities. Elsewhere in the issue, Pauline Ng updated her SIFT tool, which predicts the functional consequences of mutations, for application …

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After last month's special issue, Genome Biology has spent November in epigenomics detox. Instead we've been answering questions such as: How does your skin microbiome respond to a wound? If all those bits of the genome that spawn non-coding RNAs really aren't junk, then what is their function? And, how do CpG island promoters relate to chromatin states? (I guess that detox was incomplete.)

If there was ever a good candidate for junk DNA, then endogenous retroviruses (or ERVs) must be it. These mobile elements hop about from one bit of the genome to another, seemingly interested only in their own proliferation. All they know is …

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