Posts

Dear Biopythoneers,

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.65 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4. It is also tested on PyPy 2.0 to 2.4, PyPy3 version 2,4, and Jython 2.7b2.

The most visible change is that the Biopython sequence objects now use string comparison, rather than Python’s object comparison. This has been planned for a long time with warning messages in place (under Python 2, the warnings were sadly missing under Python 3).

Agenda

Venue: to be held by conference call on Nov 18, 2014, 12.30pm EST (17:30 UTC) 
Dial-in Information: +1-857-216-2939 PIN: 62534 http://www.uberconference.com/hlapp

1. Old business
   • Dec 2013 BoD meeting minutes
   • 2013 Financial Report
2. New business
   1. Review of 2014 financials
   2. BOSC 2015: update from the 2015 chairs (Nomi, Peter)
   3. Update on ISCB “Community of Special Interest” (COSI) (Peter)

Minutes

Etherpad for notes: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/OBF-BoD-Meeting-Nov2014

Attending:

• Board Members present: Peter Cock, Chris Dagdigian, Chris Fields, Nomi Harris, Hilmar Lapp, Jason Stajich.
• Board Member regrets: None.
• Guests: None.

Minutes:

We have asked you, and you have spoken! 59 past and/or future BOSC attendees participated in our survey, answering questions about what they liked at BOSC 2014, what changes they’d like to see, and — most importantly — what they thought about the proposal to possibly hold BOSC 2015 in Norwich (UK) rather than as an ISMB/ECCB SIG in Dublin (Ireland)..

Under this plan, BOSC 2015 would have been shortly before ISMB/ECCB, but in Norwich. We would have been hosted by The Genome Analysis Centre (TGAC) just after and co-located with the Galaxy Community Conference 2015 (GCC 2015, hosted by The Sainsbury Laboratory). Although some survey participants indicated that they would be more likely to attend BOSC 2015 if it were co-located with GCC, the majority preferred BOSC to remain an ISMB SIG, so we will hold BOSC 2015 in Dublin right before ISMB/ECCB 2015.

We’re pleased to publicly announce that we aim to video record all the talks at BOSC 2014, and the panel discussion, to be made freely available online after the conference. This is on an opt-out basis, and thus far none of our speakers have declined to be filmed. Last year we managed to record many of the talks - including both keynotes, which you can watch via the YouTube links on the BOSC 2013 Schedule. This year we are hiring a professional from Next Day Video ( @NextDayVideo on Twitter).

This is a belated notice that the OBF mailing lists are down due to a server failure. Posting a tweet is easier than writing a blog post, please follow @OBF_news for updates.

We have a complete back up and running as a virtual machine hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which should become live by Monday pending DNS updates etc.

Back in later 2012 we previously migrated the OBF websites AWS, and this has proved very reliable and saves us worrying about looking after physical hardware.

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.64 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6 and 2.7, 3.3 and also the new 3.4 version. It is also tested on PyPy 2.0 to 2.3, and Jython 2.7b2.

The new experimental module Bio.CodonAlign facilitates building codon alignment and further analysis upon it. This work is from the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project by Zheng Ruan.

Hi all, I’m pleased to announce the acceptance of OBF’s Google Summer of Code 2014 (GSoC) students:

• Sarah Berkemer - " Open source high-performance BioHaskell" (Mentors: Christian Höner zu Siederdissen, Ketil Malde) ( blog)
• Loris Cro - " An ultra-fast scalable RESTful API to query large numbers of VCF datapoints" (Mentors: Francesco Strozzi, Raoul Bonnal & the BioRuby team) ( blog)
• Victor Kofia - " JSBML: Redesign the implementation of mathematical formulas" (Mentors: Alex Thomas, Sarah Keating & the JSBML team) ( blog)
• Evan Parker - " Addition of a lazy loading sequence parser to Biopython’s SeqIO package" (Mentors: Wibowo Arindrarto, Peter Cock & the Biopython team) ( blog)
• Ibrahim Vazirabad - " Improving the Plug-in interface for CellDesigner" (Mentors: Andreas Dräger, Alex Thomas & the JSBML team) ( blog)
• Leandro Watanabe - " Dynamic Modeling of Cellular Populations within JSBML" (Mentors: Nicolas Rodriguez, Chris Myers & the JSBML team) ( blog)

Congratulations to our accepted students!

Bioinformatics Open Source Codefest, July 9 and 10th in Boston, now with sponsored food and drinks!

The OBF will be holding the fifth annual BOSC Codefest, an informal two day “hackathon” or “coding festival” preceding the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2014) in Boston (USA).

This year, the BOSC Codefest 2014 is being hosted by hack/reduce (a wonderful hackerspace in Cambridge, Boston) and has also been kindly sponsored by Curoverse (the team behind the open source platform Arvados) and Harbinger Partners, Inc. Thanks to this sponsorship, this year the organisers will able to include catering for the participants - I’m expecting at least coffee and pizza, plus what ever caffeine rich drinks or local pastries are in fashion with the Boston programmers? I checked on wikipedia and Jolt Cola doesn’t exist in the USA any more… so I’m waiting to see what our local organisers Brad Chapman & Michael Heuer have planned.

To encourage more student presentations at the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC), this year we’re waiving the registration fee for accepted student presenters. When you submit your abstract ( BOSC abstract call open until 4th April), you must tick the student box:

Student submissions must have a full-time student as the first named and presenting author, and be mostly written by students.

Please note that because BOSC registration is via the ISCB as one of the ISCM SIG meetings, eligible students must contact us before filling in their ISCB registration to ensure the BOSC SIG fee is waived.

Are you a university student and interested in spending the summer developing open-source bioinformatics software?

(Good! Keep reading.)

On Monday, March 10, Google Summer of Code 2014 (GSoC) will begin accepting student applications to work with mentoring organizations like OBF.

Here are the steps for you to prepare an application and apply for GSOC 2014 with OBF:

1. Check the OBF ideas page for potential projects you’d like to work on, and identify one or a few that you’re most interested in doing.
2. Read our guide for prospective GSoC students on the OBF wiki. Also see Google’s GSoC FAQ and GSoC student guide, if you’re with us so far.
3. Introduce yourself on the OBF GSoC mailing list. Tell us which project(s) you like, any modifications to them you’d like to make, or propose your own idea.
4. Once you’ve settled on a project or two and contacted your potential mentors, begin preparing a detailed project timeline for the summer. This timeline should cover each week of the summer, as far as you can plan it, describing the week’s specific goals, coding tasks, anticipated problems and open questions. ( Example 1, Example 2)
5. Submit your application to Google early. You can keep revising it on the Melange website until the deadline on March 21, but once you’ve submitted your basic information we can begin giving you feedback and suggestions to improve your application. In addition to your weekly timeline, you can link to examples of code you’ve written (e.g. on GitHub); a small contribution of code (e.g. a bug fix) to the project you’re applying to work with would really impress us.

Feel free to contact us on the mailing list or Google Plus if you have any questions.