Posts

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:

Dial-in information

• Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939
• PIN: 62534
• http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

Agenda

Venue: To be held by conference call on March 16, 2018, 11.00am EDT (15:00 UTC, 16:00 CET, 8.00am PDT). Note that at the time of the meeting, the US will have switched already to DST, whereas Europe will not, so the time zone difference is an hour less than it would normally be. Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939 PIN: 62534 http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

1. Old business
   • Oct 2016 BoD meeting minutes
2. New business
   1. Term expirations and Elections for the Board ( electronic ballot)
      • Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, running for Board member at-large
      • Yo Yehudi, running for Board member at-large
   2. Fiscal sponsor - experiences, lessons, possibilities

Minutes

Attending:

The OBF Board of Directors holds a public meeting about once a year, in accordance with our bylaws. The next such meeting will take place on March 16, 2018, at 15:00 UTC (11am EDT / 8am PDT / 16:00 CET). The meeting agenda can be found at /wiki/Minutes:2018_Mar_ConfCall.

At this public Board meeting, we will consider two new candidates running for Board seats: Bastian Greshake Tzovaras and Yo Yehudi. Both are known for their promotional and organizational involvement in open science, open data and open source bioinformatics.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation has been accepted as a mentoring organisation for the 2018 instance of the Google Summer of Code. OBF is acting as an umbrella for ten bioinformatics Open Source projects, making it possible to offer a very diverse set of student projects.

Are you a student and interested in applying for any of the projects? The student application period is open from March 12th through 27th from the official GSoC website. See the full timeline for details. Feel free to contact the mentors of projects you are interested in already, though.

We are pleased to announce that abstract submission and early registration for GCCBOSC2018 are now open. This event brings our annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference and the Galaxy Community Conference together into a unified week-long event. If you work in open source life science or data-intensive biomedical research, then there is no better place than GCCBOSC 2018 to present your work and to learn from others.

Arun Decano is a PhD research fellow in the Infection Genomics Group at Dublin City University in Dublin, Ireland. Her research, with advisor Dr. Tim Downing, focuses on the phylogenomic study of a multidrug-resistant bacterial population and aims to develop novel infection control strategies using whole genome sequence data.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation awarded Ms. Decano a travel fellowship to help defray the cost of attending the European Galaxy Administrator Workshop ( https://www.elixir-europe.org/events/european-galaxy-administrator-workshop) in January 2018.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program was launched in 2016 to help increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community. There are four application deadlines per year; the next will be December 15, 2017. If you are hoping to attend an open source / open science bioinformatics even and travel costs are a barrier, we encourage you to apply for one of our $1000 travel fellowships. More information, including a link to the application form, can be found at https://github.com/OBF/obf-docs/blob/master/Travel_fellowships.md.