About the OBF

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) is a non-profit, volunteer-run group that promotes open source software development and Open Science within the biological research community. Membership in the OBF is free and open to anyone who wants to help promote open source or open science in a biological field.

OBF runs the annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC).

BOSC 2025 took place July 21-22, 2025, in Liverpool, UK (as part of ISMB/ECCB 2025). BOSC 2026 will be part of ISMB 2026 in Washington, DC.

Learn More

Poster session at GCCBOSC2018

OBF Treasurer Heather Wiencko introducing OBF at BOSC 2024

OBF Event Awards

The OBF Event Fellowship program aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community.

Apply

Ruth Nanjala, an OBF Event Award winner, by her poster

HOWTO automate tree drawing

I updated the Trees HowTo with some code demonstrating how to automatically generate postscript trees from newick or nexus tree files. This uses the Bio::Tree::Draw::Cladogram module that will draw Phylograms or Cladograms. With a few unix tools ( eps2png and epstopdf [part of TeX]) you can generate png and pdf files automatically making this an easy addition to phylogenetic pipelines that generate webpages as well as stand alone applications.

mediawiki updated

Updated mediawiki to 1.10

Did a bulk creation of a number of modules wiki pages for modules that had been previously created but not added to the wiki. Added them with default module templates.

Biopython release 1.43

We are pleased to announce the release of Biopython 1.43.

This release includes a brand-new set of parsers in Bio.SeqIO by Peter Cock for reading biological sequence files in various formats, an updated Blast XML parser in Bio.Blast.NCBIXML, a new UniGene flat-file parser by Sean Davis, and numerous improvements and bug fixes in Bio.PDB, Bio.SwissProt, Bio.Nexus, BioSQL, and others. Believe it or not, even the documentation was updated.

Source distributions and Windows installers are available from the Biopython website at http://biopython.org. My thanks to all code contributers who made this new release possible.

[Read More]

RC5 for 1.5.2

Sendu has posted 1.5.2 RC5. There may be a few more kinks to work out, so try this release and report if there are problems with the tests.

RC 1.5.3

Sendu has announced that Release Candidate 3 is available for download and testing. This may be the last RC before the 1.5.2 release so give it a whirl and speak up with any problems or concerns.

Mediawiki updated

Bioperl wiki is now running Mediawiki 1.8.2. nothing too different under the hood at this point, the mediawiki people probably have more to say in the release-notes.

Next BioPerl Release

We are currently planning a timetable for the next few Bioperl releases, including the next developer release (v1.5.2), the next stable release (1.6) and beyond. Users are welcome to add requests (within reason!), donate code, etc. Lots of changes in store!

The release schedule can be found here. In order to add comments, you will be required to sign up for an account on the BioPerl wiki.

Biopython release 1.42

Dear biopythoneers,

We are pleased to announce the release of Biopython 1.42. This release includes a brand-new Genbank parser in Bio.GenBank by Peter Cock, numerous updates to Bio.Nexus by Frank Kauff and to Bio.Geo by Peter, lots of bug fixes by scores of contributors through BugZilla, and Bio.Cluster became object-oriented.

Source distributions and Windows installers are available from our spiffy new Wiki-based website at http://biopython.org. My thanks to all code contributors who made this new release possible.

[Read More]