Development

We are pleased to announce the release of BioRuby 1.5.0. This new release includes support of recent Ruby versions (Ruby 2.0.0, 2.1 and 2.2), improvement of codes, and bug fixes. Here is a brief summary of changes. Ruby 2.0.0, 2.1, 2.2 support. Some features are removed because of remote service discontinuance or difficulty of code maintenance. Refactoring of code. Bio::SPTR is renamed as Bio::UniProtKB. Bug fixes. In addition, many changes have been made, including incompatible changes. [Read More]

Call for Abstracts for the 16th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2015), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB/ECCB 2015. Dates: 10-11 July, 2015 Location: Dublin, Ireland Web site: /wiki/BOSC_2015 Email: bosc@open-bio.org BOSC announcements mailing list Twitter: @OBF_BOSC and @OBF_News Important Dates: March 24, 2015: Registration opens for ISMB and BOSC ( https://www.iscb.org/ismbeccb2015-registration) April 3, 2015: Deadline for submitting BOSC abstracts May 3, 2015: Notification of accepted talk abstracts emailed to authors July 8-9, 2015: BOSC Codefest 2015, Dublin July 10-11, 2015: BOSC 2015, Dublin July 10-14, 2015: ISMB/ECCB 2015, Dublin The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) covers the wide range of open source bioinformatics software being developed, and encompasses the growing movement of Open Science, with its focus on transparency, reproducibility, and data provenance. [Read More]

Last year’s Google Summer of Code 2014 was very productive for the OBF with six students working on Bio* and related bioinformatics projects. We applied to be part of GSoC 2015, but unfortunately this year were not accepted. Google’s program is enormously popular, and over-subscribed, meaning Google has had to rotate organisation membership. The OBF is grateful to have been accepted in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2014. This year any participation will be down to individual projects to find a willing umbrella group from the organisations accepted for GSoC 2015. [Read More]

Dear Biopythoneers, Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.65 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3 and 3.4. It is also tested on PyPy 2.0 to 2.4, PyPy3 version 2,4, and Jython 2.7b2. The most visible change is that the Biopython sequence objects now use string comparison, rather than Python’s object comparison. [Read More]

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.64 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6 and 2.7, 3.3 and also the new 3.4 version. It is also tested on PyPy 2.0 to 2.3, and Jython 2.7b2. The new experimental module Bio.CodonAlign facilitates building codon alignment and further analysis upon it. This work is from the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project by Zheng Ruan. [Read More]

Hi all, I’m pleased to announce the acceptance of OBF’s Google Summer of Code 2014 (GSoC) students: Sarah Berkemer - " Open source high-performance BioHaskell" (Mentors: Christian Höner zu Siederdissen, Ketil Malde) ( blog) Loris Cro - " An ultra-fast scalable RESTful API to query large numbers of VCF datapoints" (Mentors: Francesco Strozzi, Raoul Bonnal & the BioRuby team) ( blog) Victor Kofia - " JSBML: Redesign the implementation of mathematical formulas" (Mentors: Alex Thomas, Sarah Keating & the JSBML team) ( blog) Evan Parker - " Addition of a lazy loading sequence parser to Biopython’s SeqIO package" (Mentors: Wibowo Arindrarto, Peter Cock & the Biopython team) ( blog) Ibrahim Vazirabad - " Improving the Plug-in interface for CellDesigner" (Mentors: Andreas Dräger, Alex Thomas & the JSBML team) ( blog) Leandro Watanabe - " Dynamic Modeling of Cellular Populations within JSBML" (Mentors: Nicolas Rodriguez, Chris Myers & the JSBML team) ( blog) Congratulations to our accepted students! [Read More]

Bioinformatics Open Source Codefest, July 9 and 10th in Boston, now with sponsored food and drinks! The OBF will be holding the fifth annual BOSC Codefest, an informal two day “hackathon” or “coding festival” preceding the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2014) in Boston (USA). This year, the BOSC Codefest 2014 is being hosted by hack/reduce (a wonderful hackerspace in Cambridge, Boston) and has also been kindly sponsored by Curoverse (the team behind the open source platform Arvados) and Harbinger Partners, Inc. [Read More]

Open Bio is officially a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014! See Google’s official announcement for more details on what this means in general. What’s next? Google’s GSoC timeline lays out what we need to do as a mentoring organization during the coming weeks. Students can apply March 10–21 through the official GSoC 2014 website to work with OBF. Up to that point, we’ll be reaching out to potential students and mentors, and contining to develop potential project ideas. [Read More]

On Friday, OBF applied to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014. The core of our application to Google is our list of project ideas and our team of mentors supporting them. (We also have a separate page for general information about GSoC and OBF’s involvement.) As another way to interact with potential GSoC students, we’ve created a Google Plus page for OBF and a G+ community for OBF’s GSoC activities. [Read More]

Google Summer of Code is on again for 2014, and OBF is once again applying as a mentoring organization. Participating in GSoC as an organization is very competitive, and we will need your help in gathering a good set of ideas and potential mentors. Since OBF is an umbrella organization covering several member projects, most of these GSoC ideas will likely be associated with a specific Bio* community. For our GSoC application, and for the convenience of students, we aggregate each Bio* project’s ideas on the GSoC page of the OBF wiki, but the details of each idea are posted on the specific Bio* project’s own wiki. [Read More]