Biopython 1.72 released

Dear Biopythoneers, I’m writing this in Portland at the GCC BOSC 2018 conference, where I will present the Biopython Project Update 2018 talk tomorrow. Yesterday during my airport layover in Iceland, I published the Biopython 1.72 release to our website and PyPI: https://biopython.org/wiki/Download https://pypi.python.org/pypi/biopython/1.72 This release of Biopython supports Python 2.7, 3.4, 3.5 and 3.6. It has also been tested on PyPy2.7 v6.0.0 and PyPy3.5 v6.0.0. Internal changes to Bio.SeqIO have sped up the SeqRecord . [Read More]

OBF Birds of a Feather at GCCBOSC 2018

If you’re going to GCCBOSC 2018, we invite you to join us at the OBF Birds of a Feather on Wednesday, June 27, from 5:40-7:40pm. Come and chat over dinner! Everyone is invited, whether you’re a longtime OBF member or someone who’s never even heard of the OBF. (By the way, anyone who is involved in open source or open science is welcome to join the OBF, and there is no membership fee. [Read More]

Saving science from itself: A review of the 2018 eLife Innovation Sprint

This is a guest blog post from Anisha Keshavan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend the 2018 eLife Innovation Sprint in Cambridge, May 2018. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. This was one of three awards from our April 2018 travel fellowships call. The current call closes 15 August 2018, you might want to apply? It is hard for me to put into words the thrill, excitement, and inspiration I’m feeling after attending the 2 day eLife Innovation sprint on May 10th and 11th. The #eLifeSprint ( https://elifesciences.org/events/c40798c3/elife-innovation-sprint-2018) in Cambridge, UK, brought together software developers, researchers, designers, and anyone who was passionate about leveraging web technology to advance open scientific communication. The goal: to save science from itself! [Read More]

BioJava 5.0.0 is out

BioJava 5.0.0 was released on the 23rd of March 2018. This represents a major milestone that brings more consolidation and reorganisation of modules. This is the first release to be based on Java 8, bring in your lambdas and stream API calls! The release represents work done in the last 2 years, alpha releases were available for quite some time and now this makes all the changes officially public. Some major refactoring occurred in the biojava-structure module. [Read More]

Biopython 1.71 released

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. [Read More]

GCCBOSC 2018: A Bioinformatics Community Conference - Call for Abstracts

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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.

[Read More]

OBF Travel Fellowship - Coding in the Winter Wonderland: Galaxy Admin Training in Oslo, 2018

This blog post is syndicated from a post on Arun Decano’s blog, originally published Feb 1, 2018. Arun was supported by the ongoing OBF travel fellowship program to attend a Galaxy Admin Workshop held in Oslo, Norway Jan 7-14, 2018. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences, workshops, or training events. The next call closes 15 April 2018. [Read More]

Mailing list consolidation

The OBF’s self-hosted mailman server is still struggling right now, so we are looking at migrating the active mailing lists to paid hosting, and as part of this consolidating down to ideally about a dozen mailing lists. Currently we have a lot of mailing lists, but many are dormant or redundant. [Read More]

BOSC 2017 in Prague, the land of stories (and beer)

This is a guest blog post from Farah Zaib Khan, who was supported by the ongoing Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program to attend our annual conference BOSC 2017 and its preceding Codefest in Prague, July 2017. The OBF’s Travel Fellowship program continues to help open source bioinformatics software developers with funding to attend conferences or workshops. The current call closes 15 December 2017, you might want to apply? [Read More]

Mailing list outage, and public board meeting update

This time of year we’d normally be having a public board meeting as part of our commitment to communication with our member projects and the wider OBF community. As per our bylaws we notify the community at least 10 days in advance, and we’d also handle election of new board members and leadership changes where appropriate. For a couple of reasons, we’re going to postpone that until early 2018. Our mailing list server (which hosts many of our member project lists) has been overwhelmed in the past few days, leading to delayed or blocked communication not just to our members but for our member projects who rely on it. [Read More]