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This year, the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC) and the Bioinformatics Community Conference (BOSC) met together to form the first Bioinformatics Community Conference. At GCCBOSC 2018, participants were able to meet and collaborate with a broad community of bioinformatics developers and users who focus on open, interoperable software tools and libraries that facilitate scientific research.

Held in June 2018 at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, GCCBOSC attracted nearly 300 participants from around the world. The meeting started with two days of training workshops (Figure 1). The main meeting had some parallel sessions and some joint sessions, including well-received keynote talks by Tracy Teal, Fernando Pérez and Lucia Peixoto, as well as a panel discussion about documentation and training. Posters, demos and Birds of a Feather sessions ( BoFs) gave participants opportunities to engage in discussions about topics of mutual interest. After the main meeting, many attendees stayed for up to four additional collaboration days (the CollaborationFest, or CoFest). Figure 1. Participants at one of the GCCBOSC training workshops. (All GCCBOSC photographs in this post are from Bérénice Batut’s Flickr album, under a CC-BY-SA license.) Figures 2,3. Attendees and presenters mingled at the poster/demo sessions.

It was really great to meet so many of you at GCCBOSC this year! We will soon have a couple of Travel Fellowship blog posts talking about the conference, so we won’t provide too much of a general overview at this point, but we would like to share a little more about one of the Bird of Feather (BoF) events we ran - specifically the OBF community BoF. The aim of this BoF was to engage anyone who was:

Dear Biopythoneers,

I’m writing this in Portland at the GCC BOSC 2018 conference, where I will present the Biopython Project Update 2018 talk tomorrow. Yesterday during my airport layover in Iceland, I published the Biopython 1.72 release to our website and PyPI:

https://biopython.org/wiki/Download https://pypi.python.org/pypi/biopython/1.72

This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6. It has also been tested on PyPy2.7 v6.0.0 and PyPy3.5 v6.0.0.

Internal changes to Bio.SeqIO have sped up the SeqRecord .format method and SeqIO.write (especially when used in a for loop).

If you’re going to GCCBOSC 2018, we invite you to join us at the OBF Birds of a Feather on Wednesday, June 27, from 5:40-7:40pm. Come and chat over dinner! Everyone is invited, whether you’re a longtime OBF member or someone who’s never even heard of the OBF. (By the way, anyone who is involved in open source or open science is welcome to join the OBF, and there is no membership fee.) More details at https://gccbosc2018.sched.com/event/FCGp We look forward to seeing some of you there!

We had another great round of applications for the OBF Travel Fellowship this spring. After reviewing the applications, the OBF Board selected three recipients, who have all accepted the award.

Congratulations to our spring 2018 recipients:

• Anisha Keshavan –  attended the eLife Innovation Sprint. Anisha is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, where she develops open source code, including citizen scientist platforms for image quality classification and image segmentation ( update - see blog post).
• Farah Zaib Khan – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Farah is a Common Workflow Language contributor based at the University of Melbourne. She has recently been working on a project to record the provenance of CWL workflows, and first attended BOSC in 2017 ( update - see blog post).
• Tendai Mutangadura – attending GCCBOSC2018 including the CollaborationFest. Tendai is a first-time BOSC attendee who works at the University of Missouri and focuses on studying disease-causing mutations in canine genomics ( update - see blog post).

Watch this space for blog posts from each of the awardees ( update - links added above).

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is again participating in the Google Summer of Code program this year. Last Monday the selected students were announced. Congratulations to all of you, and a heartfelt welcome. I also want to use this opportunity to thank all students who applied. Resources were limited, we did not get all the slots that we asked for, and so we had to make some tough choices.  We wish you all the best for your future endeavours, and hope to be able to work with you in future. The field of bioinformatics is a small one, as you will find out.

BioJava 5.0.0 was released on the 23rd of March 2018. This represents a major milestone that brings more consolidation and reorganisation of modules. This is the first release to be based on Java 8, bring in your lambdas and stream API calls!

The release represents work done in the last 2 years, alpha releases were available for quite some time and now this makes all the changes officially public.

Some major refactoring occurred in the biojava-structure module. The data model to deal with macromolecular structures has been adapted to be closer to the mmCIF data model. Other improvements in biojava-structure are support for MMTF format and improved symmetry detection code.

Dear Biopythoneers,

Source distributions of Biopython 1.71 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website, and the release is also on the Python Package Index (PyPI) including pre-compiled Wheel Packages for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6 (we have now dropped support for Python 3.3). It has also been tested on PyPy2.7 v5.10.0 and PyPy3.5 v5.10.1.

Python 3 is the primary development platform for Biopython. We will drop support for Python 2.7 no later than 2020, in line with the end-of-life or sunset date for Python 2.7 itself.

As mentioned in our previous blog post, last Friday the OBF had a board of directors meeting. One of the notable meeting items this time was to elect more board members to help be involved with the community. We’re pleased to announce that both candidates, Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Yo Yehudi, were unanimously voted in by the other board members!Logically, one of their first moves as newly minted members was to draft this blog post! Some of the their possible ideas for the future include: