BioJava 1.3 Released

Thomas Down writes:

After a long series of pre-releases (and many bug fixes), I’ve just finished building BioJava 1.30. Source, binaries, and javadocs can all be found at:

http://www.biojava.org/download/

As with the pre-releases, separate binaries are available for java platform releases 1.3 and 1.4. The 1.4 releases include some extra features which depend on jdk1.4 extensions such as the java.nio package.

Highlights of this release include:

- Packed storage of sequence data in memory

- Better support for the OBDA database access standards

- Improvements to the parsers for output from tools like blast and fasta.

- Many enhancements to the FeatureFilter system.

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The Open Biological Database Access (OBDA) introduction for BioPerl

Do you need to access sequences from multiple places? Would you like to easily retrieve your own local sequences from indexed flat files, all other sequences on species X from department wide raletional database and the rest from global internet servers?

The Open Biological Database Access (OBDA) System was designed so that one could use the same application code to access data from all three of the database types by simply changing a few lines in a “configuration file”. This makes application code more portable and easier to maintain.

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AGP-bases DAS reference server available

Tony writes: {{ double-space-with-newline }} I have just checked in to the Bio::Das perl beta CVS repository (“Bio-Das2”) a collection of modules that creates a minimal DAS reference server from a single AGP file (or a directory of one or more files). There is also a sample server script in the “eg” directory.

Briefly, the server is started using something like:

cd ./eg
./agpserver --dsn ncbi31 --port 3000 --agpfile ./AGP/chr1.agp

It can then be used by a DAS client in the normal way. It is simple (no frills!) and capable of serving assembly information, entry_points, DSN info, features across a segment and features by ID. No other DAS commands are supported yet.

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parser for ab initio gene predictor GlimmerM in CVS

Jason writes:

I’ve added a parser for the ab initio gene predictor GlimmerM in Bio::Tools::Glimmer. Tests are added to t/Genpred.t now.

It follows the Bio::Tools::AnalysisParser interface which support the next_prediction call and returns a Bio::Tools::Prediction::Gene object in the same way as Genscan.

I also have some scripts for building the training set file so you can run Glimmer on other species. There is also a similar script for building custom splice sites file for Genewise which I’ll commit soon. Basically it takes as input a GFF file which has exons annotated (typically from Sim4/Exonerate alignments of cDNA to DNA) and a reference to the genomic DNA db (typically just a flatfile which we index with Bio::DB::Flat).

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BioSQL and Bioperl-db inching towards release

Hilmar writes:

I got the Oracle version of the biosql schema fully migrated, at least as far as I can tell from here. I’m going to commit the new version some time today. There will also be a sql*plus migration script from pre-Singapore to the current version that supposedly keeps your data intact (be sure to read the disclaimer though).

This means we’re getting ready to release Biosql 1.0, possibly as early as next week. If anyone sees any problems with the current schema that he/she thinks should be corrected before this release, please speak up now. I guess I should make an effort and generate an updated ERD before release; the dated ones are confusing wrt the current schema. If there is consensus I’ll put out a release candidate early next week.

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