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.

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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.

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

Updated PDoc software

Raphaël Leplae has updated the Pdoc software to have an improved stylesheet and fix several bugs including problems rendering Bio::DB::Fasta. Thanks a lot Raphaël and Patrick Meidl for getting the bugs reported and fixed for this nice POD to HTML converter.

You can see the Pdoc for Bioperl packages in action at the doc.bioperl.org site. See the bottom links which are for live code, the frozen version for releases remains, well, frozen.

Modware: a BioPerl based API for Chado

We are announcing a new Sourceforge Project called Modware. It is an object-oriented API written in Perl that creates BioPerl object representations of biological features stored in a Chado database. It basically creates a Bio::Seq object for chromosomes in Chado and creates Bio::SeqFeature::Gene objects for protein coding transcripts stored in Chado. Things like contigs are represented as Bio::SeqFeature::Generic objects. We also provide many methods for manipulating these objects once they are in memory.

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ListSummaries for April 26-May 9

ListSummaries for April 26-May 9 are up at the usual place:

http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/Mailing_list_summaries

Direct link:

http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/ListSummary:April_26-May_9%2C2006

It’s a bit of a hurried one so don’t be surprised to find a few spelling errors here and there. I’m getting ready for a conference in a couple weeks so I may be off the radar a bit here and there. The next ListSummary won’t be posted until May 26. Enjoy!

BioPerl-run in FreeBSD

It’s my great pleasure to announce the availability of the BioPerl-run packages (stable & developer releases) for the FreeBSD operating system.

For instructions on how to install BioPerl ports in FreeBSD, please take a look into the Getting Bioperl section of the BioPerl Wiki.

RSS feeds

I’ve added a page about RSS feeds in BioPerl. These include links to CVS commits as a RSS feed. This a bit of a hack using cvs2rss and cvs2cl and I have hardcoded it to show the last 30 commits only.

In addition RSS news is now embedded on the main BioPerl and Tracking CVS commits webpages to make for better interlinking between the news and wiki site ( you might even be reading this there).

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