Community

Hello from Berlin, where the pre-BOSC informal CodeFest 2013 meeting is already underway. We’re looking forward to seeing even more of you on Friday and Saturday for BOSC 2013.

BOSC 2013 will be the 14th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, and is organised by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF). It is held as a Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting in conjunction with the ISMB conference, which itself is held jointly with the ECCB meeting every second year. This year the ISMB/ECCB 2013 is in Berlin, Germany.

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.61 are now available from the downloads page on the Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

The updated Biopython Tutorial and Cookbook is online ( PDF).

Platforms/Deployment

We currently support Python 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 and also test under Python 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 (including modules using NumPy), and Jython 2.5 and PyPy 1.9 (Jython and PyPy do not cover NumPy or our C extensions). We are still encouraging early adopters to help test on these platforms, and have included a ‘beta’ installer for Python 3.2 (and Python 3.3 to follow soon) under 32-bit Windows.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) will be holding a public Board of Directors meeting on Tuesday, 13 Nov, 2012, at 11.30am EST (8.30am PST, 17:30 CET, 16:30 UTC/GMT).

The meeting will be held online or over conference call. We will post details about how to dial in or connect closer to the date ( here).

On the agenda Richard Holland and Chris Fields are running for election to the Board, and some other items primarily up for discussion, including how to keep our membership roll up-to-date and increasing with the least barriers. We will post a more detailed agenda in advance of the meeting ( here).

I am very pleased to announce that the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F) is now a Software in the Public Interest (SPI) associated project, rather than its own not-for-profit incorporation.

An electronic vote of O|B|F members on whether or not to provisionally approve the invitation from SPI closed yesterday at 19:00 UTC. We had a participation of 39 out of 105 eligible, or 37%, which is far above the quorum of 10%. The tally is 38 for provisionally accepting and 1 against. The tally can be seen (and audited) here: https://vote.heliosvoting.org/helios/e/OBFjoiningSPI

Earlier this year BioRuby and then Biopython and BioPerl started using Travis-CI.org, a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community, to run their unit tests automatically whenever their GitHub repositories are updated:

• BioRuby
• Biopython
• BioPerl

The BioRuby team are also using Travis-CI for automated testing of their new ‘plugin’ ecosystem, BioRuby Gems, or BioGems.

Travis-CI gives us continuous testing, but for the moment only covers one operating system (currently 32 bit Ubuntu Linux using Virtual Machines). This automated testing is therefore complementary to our existing OBF BuildBot server which aims to run nightly tests on volunteer developer machines setup to cover a broad range of operating systems and configurations.

Hello all,

I’m very pleased and excited to announce that the Open Bioinformatics Foundation has selected 5 very capable students to work on OBF projects this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program.

The accepted students, their projects, and their mentors (in alphabetical order):

• Wibowo Arindrarto:
  SearchIO Implementation in Biopython
  mentored by Peter Cock
• Lenna Peterson:
  Diff My DNA: Development of a Genomic Variant Toolkit for Biopython
  mentored by Brad Chapman, Reece Hart, James Casbon
• Marjan Povolni:
  The worlds fastest parallelized GFF3/GTF parser in D, and an interfacing biogem plugin for Ruby
  mentored by Pjotr Prins, Francesco Strozzi, Raoul Bonnal
• Artem Tarasov:
  Fast parallelized GFF3/GTF parser in C++, with Ruby FFI bindings
  mentored by Pjotr Prins, Francesco Strozzi, Raoul Bonnal
• Clayton Wheeler:
  Multiple Alignment Format parser for BioRuby
  mentored by Francesco Strozzi and Raoul Bonnal

As in every year, we received many great applications and ideas. However, funding and mentor resources are limited, and we were not able to accept as many as we would have liked. Our deepest thanks to all the students who applied: we sincerely appreciate the time and effort you put into your applications, and hope you will still consider being a part of the OBF’s open source projects, even without Google funding. I speak for myself and all of the mentors who read and scored applications when I say that we were truly honored by the number and quality of the applications we received.

Google announced today that the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2012!

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a Google-sponsored student internship program for open-source projects, open to students from around the world (not just US residents). Students are paid a $5000 USD stipend to work as a developer on an open-source project for the summer. For more on GSoC, see the GSoC 2012 FAQ.

Call for Abstracts for the 13th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2012), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB 2012.

Dates: July 13-14, 2012 Location: Long Beach, California Web site: /wiki/BOSC_2012 Email: bosc@open-bio.org BOSC announcements mailing list: http://lists.open-bio.org/mailman/listinfo/bosc-announce

Important Dates:

• April 13, 2012: Deadline for submitting abstracts
• May 7, 2012: Notification of accepted talk abstracts emailed to authors
• July 11-12, 2012: Codefest 2012 programming session
• July 13-14, 2012: BOSC 2012
• July 15-17, 2012: ISMB 2012

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development within the biological research community. To be considered for acceptance, software systems representing the central topic in a presentation submitted to BOSC must be licensed with a recognized Open Source License, and be freely available for download in source code form.

I’ve just finished writing up an example for the Biopython Tutorial of the new GenomeDiagram functionality added in Biopython 1.59. You can now control the start and end points of individual tracks, and you can add cross-links between regions of different tracks, as shown here:

This example attempts a simplified reproduction of Figure 6 in Proux et al. (2002), and shows three related phage genomes one above the other. Different classes of genes have been given different colors, while the strength of the red shaded cross-links indicates the percentage identity of the linked genes. Note there are some minor differences in the GenBank annotation we’ve used and the genes shown in the original figure.

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.59 are now available from the downloads page on the Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI).

Platforms/Deployment

We currently support Python 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 and also test under Jython 2.5 (which does not cover NumPy). Please note that this release will not work on Python 2.4

Most functionality is also working under Python 3.1 and 3.2 (including modules using NumPy), and under PyPy (excluding our NumPy dependencies). We are now encouraging early adopters to help beta testing on these platforms.