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The next deadline for the OBF travel fellowship is coming up soon on August 15, 2017. If you are attending any event that develops / promotes open source software or open science, and you are willing to write a blog post about the event, we welcome your application. See the travel fellowship page for more details and link to the application form.

Dear Biopythoneers,

Source distributions of Biopython 1.70 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website, and the release is also on the Python Package Index (PyPI). Windows installers and/or wheels should be available later. ( Update: Compiled wheel packages now available 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 PyPy v5.7, PyPy3.5 v5.8 beta, and Jython 2.7 (although we are deprecating support for Jython).

We had a huge response to this round of the OBF travel award. After reviewing the applications, the OBF board selected four recipients. Three applicants accepted awards, and all plan to use the funds to attend this year’s BOSC, to take place July 22-23 in Prague.

Congratulations to our spring 2017 recipients:

• Sourav Singh, who will participate in the Codefest and present the Biopython Project Update 2017 talk
• Jonathan Sobel, presenting on a citizen science project named BeerDeCoded, carried out by members of the Swiss non-profit called the Hackuarium
• Jiwen Xin, presenting the BioThings Explorer project, which integrates genomic data via public APIs

We encourage everyone at BOSC to come out and support our award winners! After BOSC, watch for blog posts from each of the awardees.

We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2017, and our first sponsors.

But first a final reminder - today (Thursday 13 April 2017) is our deadline for submitting a full length talk abstract to BOSC 2017.

Dawn Field

Dawn Field is a Lamberg International Guest Professor at Göteborg University’s Department of Marine Sciences. Previously she was a senior research fellow at the NERC Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, Head of the Molecular Evolution and Bioinformatics Group at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Wallingford, UK, and a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. She is also a founder of the Genomic Standards Consortium, the Genomic Observatories Network and Ocean Sampling Day.

Dear Biopythoneers,

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.69 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website, and the release is also on the Python Package Index (PyPI).

The OBF has at least one public board meeting per year, in part to vote on important business issues, and in part to publicly discuss items relevant to the OBF community.  The latest public OBF Board of Director’s meeting took place October 4, 2016. It was attended by Board members Hilmar Lapp, Peter Cock, Nomi Harris, Chris Fields, and Karen Cranston, as well as guests Heather Wiencko (Board candidate), Michael Crusoe, Spencer Bliven, and Robert Gilmore.

The agenda, and tentative minutes (taken by then-secretary Peter Cock) are available from the OBF wiki.  The following is a summary:

Agenda

Venue: To be held by conference call on Oct 4, 2016, 12.30pm EDT (16:30 UTC, 17:30 BST, 18:30 CEST, 9.30am PDT)  Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939 PIN: 62534 http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

1. Old business
   • May 2015 BoD meeting minutes
   • Amendments to the 2013 Financial Report
   • 2014 Financial Report
2. New business
   1. Term expirations and Elections for the Board ( electronic ballot)
      • Heather Wiencko, running for election to the Board.
      • Hilmar Lapp, President of the Board. Running for re-election.
      • Peter Cock, Secretary. Running for re-election to the Board and as Treasurer.
      • Chris Fields, Board member at-large. Running for re-election to the Board and as Secretary.
      • Nomi Harris, Board member at-large. Running for re-election.
   2. Proposed changes to the OBF Bylaws: Part 1 and Part 2
   3. Options for and hurdles to generating revenue from selling swag (OBF project-branded merchandise)

Minutes

Etherpad for notes: https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/OBF-BoD-Meeting-Oct2016

We are happy to announce the long-awaited release of BioPerl v1.7.0.  The release is now available on CPAN and Github.

During this release series, we will move some extraneous code to separate repositories and CPAN releases, primarily to reduce the number of dependencies required for BioPerl installation (in many cases for modules that are never used) and also reduce maintenance overhead.

This may only impact you if your code incorrectly list the immediate downstream dependencies that you utilize.  For example, we have now moved Bio::Coordinate code to a separate repo and will release it as a separate distribution on CPAN.  If your tools require Bio::Coordinate::Result and list this module as a dependency, you should be fine: a separate Bio::Coordinate release should pull in the latest BioPerl, until then it would pull in the last BioPerl release with that module.  However, if you list Bio::Root::Root or Bio::Perl as a dependency to pull in Bio::Coordinate::Result, your installation will not work correctly (as Bio::Root::Root is not the proper code dependency).  We can work with distributions affected to help with this transition and will be more consistently evaluating reverse dependencies on CPAN for upcoming releases as we split out code.  Please post issues on Github if you see problems with your code and the latest release.