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

FAQ updated

The Frequently Asked Questions have been entered into the Wiki and is available.

Seen on the road

After halloween party at our house from a few years ago there was a little more public direction on who to ask for Bioperl help…

Getting BlastXML using RemoteBlast

According to NCBI - BlastXML (and ASN.1) is the only guaranteed always parseable report format that is provided by their web CGI script. Here is some code to specify how the data should be requested (and perhaps this will become the default). [Read More]

Logo Ideas

I’ve started uploading some logo ideas that I’ve been playing with. Potential_Logos. These include logos for the blog front page as well as the Wiki site (and generally a BioPerl logo). O|B|F logos are welcome too.

-jason

New Wiki Content

I’ve started migrating content to the Wiki Site. I am hoping this will work out well. We need a couple of things.

  1. Decide on a theme for this site, customize it to make it a Bioperl style. Consider having a unifying style across all the O|B|F sites as Chris started doing with the foundation site.

  2. Generate a project image (or several that can be rotated) for the header on the site, something with a camel and DNA and images of phylogenetic trees and BLAST searches would be cool.

    [Read More]

Biopython release 1.41

We are pleased to announce the release of Biopython 1.41. Many improvements were made in Biopython during the eight months since the previous release, and the new release contains lots of bugfixes, improvements, new functionalities, and better documentation. To pick a few, there’s the new Bio.MEME module by Jason Hackney, updates to the Blast parser using Bertrand Frottier’s NCBIXML code, a BLAT parser by Yair Benita, numerous updates in Bio.PDB, CompareACE support in AlignAce, and improved user-friendliness in Bio.Seq.

[Read More]

Bioperl 1.5.1

I am pleased to announce the 1.5.1 developer release of Bioperl.

Essential links here Core http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-1.5.1.tar.gz http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-1.5.1.zip http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-1.5.1.tar.bz2

Run http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-run-1.5.1.tar.gz http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-run-1.5.1.zip http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-run-1.5.1.tar.bz2

Ext http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-ext-1.5.1.tar.gz http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-ext-1.5.1.zip http://bioperl.org/DIST/bioperl-ext-1.5.1.tar.bz2

MD5 sum http://bioperl.org/DIST/SIGNATURES.md5

Please see my mailing list post for more information.

[Read More]

O|B|F Board of Directors Meeting

The 2005 Board of Directors meeting for the Open Bioinformatics Foundation was held on Thursday, June 24th 2005 in Detroit, MI USA at the site of the BOSC2005 meeting.

This was a major meeting and represents the first attempt to build a governance platform for the organization as well as set up the mechanism for building a voting membership. The O|B|F members will be able to direct the operation of the organization and will also be able to join the Board.

Other major news from the meeting: - Ewan Birney steps down as president; joins Board as at-large member - Jason Stajich joins board and is elected President - Hilmar Lapp is elected to a new position of ‘Parlimentarian’ - Determined efforts to build a voting membership body

Links to meeting minutes and Election Bylaws follow are below …

[Read More]

site updated prior to server move

The backend MovableType software powering this site was upgraded and the backend storage was switched from berkelyDB to SQL. These preparations are being done to ease the transition of http://news.open-bio.org to a new server. The primary purpose of this news entry is to confirm that the posting system still works after the upgrade!