The talk videos from BOSC 2024 are now available on YouTube. They are also linked from the BOSC talk schedule (scroll down to “Talks”).

Stay tuned - our full report on BOSC 2024 will be published soon!

Starting in July 2019, OBF Board public meeting minutes can be found in our GitHub repository.

By Beatrice Mihalache

Examining open source projects has been most useful to me while I am sharpening my coding skills, so I was excited to learn about the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference – BOSC.  I am a rising senior at UCLA, studying biophysics and data science. I strongly believe in open source, so I submitted the work I’d done with my PI and my grad student collaborator for a poster presentation at BOSC. My research lab at UCLA allocates conference participation funds only for graduate students, therefore I also included a request for fee waiver with my conference submission. I was excited when a few weeks later I received notification that not only I was accepted as a poster presenter, but that I also got free registration to both BOSC and to the entire ISMB (Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology) conference!

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Urszula Włodkowska, a PhD Researcher at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology PAS was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the University of Waterloo’s Nengo Summer School.

In June of 2024, I had a great opportunity to attend the University of Waterloo’s Nengo Summer School (also known as Brain Camp). This was only possible thanks to the fellowship I received from the Open Bioinformatics Foundation.

Biopython 1.84 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI.

This contains about 5 months worth of updates, so the change-log in the news file is longer than usual. There have also been a few deprecations, most noteworthy this may be our last release with Python 3.9 support.

Many thanks to the Biopython developers and community for making this release possible, especially the following contributors:

• Anil Tuncel (first contribution)
• David Cain
• Fabio Zanini (first contribution)
• Joao Rodrigues
• Judith Bernett (first contribution)
• Luca Monari (first contribution)
• Meridia Jane Bryant (first contribution)
• Manuel Lera-Ramirez
• Michael M. (first contribution)
• Michiel de Hoon
• Peter Cock
• Rudolf Koopmann (first contribution)
• Will Tyler (first contribution)

The call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship 2024, round 2, is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 August 2024. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form. We have provided a Word template to help you draft the application locally before filling out the form – make a copy of this template.

The OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events that promote open-source bioinformatics and/or open science. We invite applications from candidates seeking financial support to attend relevant scientific events from September 2024 to March 2025. These events include conferences, workshops, code fests, hackathons, training courses, collaborative sprints, informal meet-ups or other skill-building and networking events. For more details, please read our OBF Event Fellowship policy document.

This year will mark the 15th edition of the BOSC-associated CollaborationFest, or CoFest for short. At these events, participants work together on code, documentation, training materials, use cases, and analyses.

CoFest 2024 will take place on July 17-18, right after ISMB and BOSC 2024. This will be a hybrid event, hosted at UQAM | Université du Québec à Montréal and online. Many thanks to Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo , BF Francis Ouellette, and Karen Reynard for finding and donating the use of this venue!

BOSC is an entirely volunteer-run event. We have an organizing committee of 8 people (see /events/bosc-2024/), and we are assisted by a larger review committee. The review committee is responsible for reading all the submitted abstracts and assessing them for quality and appropriateness to BOSC. You can read more about our review process here.

Our tentative review committee for 2024 is listed below. If you have any concerns about anyone on the list, please contact us at bosc@open-bio.org (that mailing list is private to the organizing committee and is not accessible to the larger review committee) or private-message any of the organizing committee members by email or in Slack.

A PhD student’s perspective on attending the 17th Annual International Biocuration Conference in Faridabad, India

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Thea Fennell, a PhD Researcher at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, was awarded an OBF Event Fellowship to attend the 17th Annual International Biocuration Conference.

“The best use for your data will be thought of by someone else” — Rufus Pollock encapsulates this concept in all its power and humility. It is at the core of open science and biocuration. Almost by definition, FAIR data is non-proprietary, yet the work done to generate, curate, and share it is invaluable. Recent proceedings at the 17th Annual International Biocuration Conference (AIBC), hosted at the Indian Biological Data Centre (IBDC) in Faridabad, were a testament to this duality.

Gemma Turon, PhD spoke at an ISCBacademy webinar on March 5, 2024. Her talk was entitled “Ersilia, open source AI/ML for (antimicrobial) drug discovery”. The talk video is now available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcEkCuJpZbw. Dr. Turon’s bio and talk abstract can be found in this blog post.