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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 [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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. [Read More]

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). [Read More]

The annual Board of Directors Meeting of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation will take place on November 8, 2011. As in previous years, it will be held by conference call, estimated to be about 2 hrs long. The meeting will on Tuesday 8 November 2011, at 11am EST, 8am PST, 16:00 UTC/GMT, 17:00 CET, or Wednesday 9 November 1am JST. Note for translating into other time zones that by then both Europe and the US have gone off DST. [Read More]

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.58 are available from the downloads page on the Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). A new interface and parsers for the PAML (Phylogenetic Analysis by Maximum Likelihood) package of programs, supporting codeml, baseml and yn00 as well as a Python re-implementation of chi2 was added as the Bio.Phylo.PAML module. Bio.SeqIO now includes read and write support for the SeqXML, a simple XML format offering basic annotation support. [Read More]

Great news: Google announced today that the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this summer’s 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 GSoC 2011 FAQ. [Read More]

Due to a huge influx of spam across all OBF wikis, we are in the process of locking down new user account creation and adding OpenID logins for the OBF wikis (BioPerl example). User account creation via the old login system will be disabled and OpenID will be the default path for new accounts so users to make wiki changes. This currently appears to have cut the incidence of spam significantly. [Read More]

The OBF now has a sparkly new Redmine instance running on Amazon EC2, thanks to efforts from Chris Dagdigian and Jason Stajich (with some admin help from yours truly). Bugs and user names (along with email contacts) from our old Bugzilla v2 server have been migrated over, though some links need to be fixed. Redmine is a project management web application that has several nice features over other systems, including issue tracking, multiple project management, wikis, forums, and calendaring. [Read More]