Development

We are pleased to announce the release of BioRuby 1.3.1. This new release fixes many bugs existed in 1.3.0. Here is a brief summary of changes. Refactoring of BioSQL support. Bio::PubMed bug fixes. Bio::NCBI::REST bug fixes. Bio::GCG::Msf bug fixes. Bio::Fasta::Report bug fixes and added support for multiple query sequences. Bio::Sim4::Report bug fixes. Added unit tests for Bio::GCG::Msf and Bio::Sim4::Report. License of BioRuby is clarified. In addition, many changes have been made, mainly bug fixes. [Read More]

We are pleased to announce the release of Biopython 1.51.This new stable release enhances version 1.50 (released in April) by extending the functionality of existing modules, adding a set of application wrappers for popular alignment programs and fixing a number of minor bugs. In particular, the SeqIO module can now write Genbank files that include features, and deal with FASTQ files created by Illumina 1.3+. Support for this format allows interconversion between FASTQ files using Solexa, Sanger and Ilumina variants using conventions agreed upon with the BioPerl and EMBOSS projects. [Read More]

A beta release for Biopython 1.51 is now available for download and testing. In the two months since Biopython 1.50 was released, we have introduced support for writing features in GenBank files using Bio.SeqIO, extended SeqIO’s support for the FASTQ format to include files created by Illumina 1.3+, and added a new set of application wrappers for alignment programs, and made numerous tweaks and bug fixes. All the new features have been tested by the dev team but it’s possible there are cases that we haven’t been able to foresee and test, especially for the GenBank feature writer (as there as just so many possible odd fuzzy feature locations). [Read More]

Constructing complicated NCBI Entrez searches can be tricky, but it turns out one of the Entrez Programming Utilities called Entrez EInfo can help. For example, suppose you want to search for mitochondrial genomes from a given taxa - either just in the Entrez web interface, for use in a script with EFetch. I knew from past experience about using name[ORGN] in Entrez to search for an organism name - but how would you specify just mitochondria? [Read More]

We are pleased to announce Biopython release 1.50, featuring some significant additions since Biopython 1.49 was released late last year. GenomeDiagram by Leighton Pritchard has been integrated into Biopython as the Bio.Graphics.GenomeDiagram module. A new module Bio.Motif has been added, which is intended to replace the existing Bio.AlignAce and Bio.MEME modules. Also have a look at Bio.SwissProt and Bio.ExPASy and their revised parsers. As noted in a previous news posting, Bio. [Read More]

We are pleased to announce a beta release of Biopython 1.50 for public testing. There have been some significant changes since Biopython 1.49 was released late last year. GenomeDiagram by Leighton Pritchard has been integrated into Biopython as the Bio.Graphics.GenomeDiagram module. A new module Bio.Motif has been added, which is intended to replace the existing Bio.AlignAce and Bio.MEME modules. Also have a look at Bio.ExPASy and the revised Prosite and Enzyme parsers. [Read More]

Those of you doing next generation sequencing may be pleased to know that the next release of Biopython is expected to include support for reading and writing FASTQ and QUAL files within our Bio.SeqIO interface. These formats are used for traditional Sanger capillary sequencing, and Roche 454 sequencing (Roche provide tools to convert from their binary SFF files) with PHRED quality scores. Solexa/Illumina sequencers produce a FASTQ variant where the quality scores are encoded differently, and this is also supported. [Read More]

Initially for evaluation purposes only, Giovanni and Bartek have setup a mirror of Biopython on GitHub, which is automatically updated from the OBF hosted Biopython CVS repository. See our git migration wiki page for details. If this is favorably received, then moving Biopython from CVS to git seems likely at some point this year. Originally, all the OBF hosted projects used CVS for their source code repositories. At the start of 2008, BioPerl and BioJava moved over to Subversion (SVN), followed by BioSQL. [Read More]