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The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Jacob González Isa, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge (started October 2024) and formerly an MSc student at the Technical University of Madrid, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the first Congress of the Spanish Society of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (SEBiBC).

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Keerthana Padmanabhan, a PhD researcher at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, INDIA, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the Transatlantic Behavioral Neuroscience Summer School 2024 (TBNSS 2024).

In September 2024, I had the wonderful opportunity to attend the Transatlantic Behavioral Neuroscience Summer School 2024 (TBNSS 2024) conducted in Mikolajki, Poland, from September 9th to 20th 2024 by the Nencki Open Lab, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology PAS, Poland. First and foremost, this was made possible by the travel fellowship granted to me by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation, for which I am extremely grateful.

The call for applications for round 3 of the OBF Event Fellowship for 2024 is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 December 2024. You can submit your application through this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events that promote open-source bioinformatics and/or open science. We invite applications from candidates seeking financial support to attend relevant scientific events between January and December 2025. These events include conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. For more details, please read our OBF Event Fellowship policy document.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Felipe de Jesús Castañeda Córdova, an MD/MS student from LIIGH-UNAM (Laboratorio Internacional para la Investigacion sobre el Genoma Humano) Mexico was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the EMBL-EBI Cancer Genomics and Transcriptomics 2024.

My name is Felipe de Jesús Castañeda Córdova. I am an MD/MS student from Mexico, primarily focusing on the wet lab aspect of lab work at the Cancer Genetics and Bioinformatics Lab. I had limited experience with bioinformatics (I performed some transcriptomic analyses for my master’s project, and I got the bug!), so I decided to apply to the online EMBL-EBI Cancer Genomics and Transcriptomics 2024 course. I was fortunate to be accepted into the program and receive an OBF Event Fellowship, which helped me cover the registration fee.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Zehra Köksal, a Research assistant at the University Of Copenhagen and Karolinska Institute was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the 30th Congress of the International Society for Forensic Genetics.

In September 2024, the Open Bioinformatics Foundation enabled me to attend the biennial conference for Forensic Geneticists from the biggest forensic genetics society worldwide – the International Society of Forensic Genetics (ISFG) - that took place in Santiago de Compostela in beautiful Spain.

The talk videos from BOSC 2024 are now available on YouTube. They are also linked from the BOSC talk schedule (scroll down to “Talks”).

Stay tuned - our full report on BOSC 2024 will be published soon!

Starting in July 2019, OBF Board public meeting minutes can be found in our GitHub repository.

By Beatrice Mihalache

Examining open source projects has been most useful to me while I am sharpening my coding skills, so I was excited to learn about the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference – BOSC.  I am a rising senior at UCLA, studying biophysics and data science. I strongly believe in open source, so I submitted the work I’d done with my PI and my grad student collaborator for a poster presentation at BOSC. My research lab at UCLA allocates conference participation funds only for graduate students, therefore I also included a request for fee waiver with my conference submission. I was excited when a few weeks later I received notification that not only I was accepted as a poster presenter, but that I also got free registration to both BOSC and to the entire ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference!

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Urszula Włodkowska, a PhD Researcher at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology PAS was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the University of Waterloo’s Nengo Summer School.

In June of 2024, I had a great opportunity to attend the University of Waterloo’s Nengo Summer School (also known as Brain Camp). This was only possible thanks to the fellowship I received from the Open Bioinformatics Foundation.

Biopython 1.84 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI.

This contains about 5 months worth of updates, so the change-log in the news file is longer than usual. There have also been a few deprecations, most noteworthy this may be our last release with Python 3.9 support.

Many thanks to the Biopython developers and community for making this release possible, especially the following contributors:

• Anil Tuncel (first contribution)
• David Cain
• Fabio Zanini (first contribution)
• Joao Rodrigues
• Judith Bernett (first contribution)
• Luca Monari (first contribution)
• Meridia Jane Bryant (first contribution)
• Manuel Lera-Ramirez
• Michael M. (first contribution)
• Michiel de Hoon
• Peter Cock
• Rudolf Koopmann (first contribution)
• Will Tyler (first contribution)