Biopython

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.60 are now available from the downloads page on the Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). Platforms/Deployment We currently support Python 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 and also test under Jython 2.5 and PyPy 1.9 (which does not cover NumPy or our C extensions). Please note that Python 2.4 or earlier is not supported. Most functionality is also working under Python 3. [Read More]

Hello all, I’m very pleased and excited to announce that the Open Bioinformatics Foundation has selected 5 very capable students to work on OBF projects this summer as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. The accepted students, their projects, and their mentors (in alphabetical order): Wibowo Arindrarto: SearchIO Implementation in Biopython mentored by Peter Cock Lenna Peterson: Diff My DNA: Development of a Genomic Variant Toolkit for Biopython [Read More]

I’ve just finished writing up an example for the Biopython Tutorial of the new GenomeDiagram functionality added in Biopython 1.59. You can now control the start and end points of individual tracks, and you can add cross-links between regions of different tracks, as shown here: This example attempts a simplified reproduction of Figure 6 in Proux et al. (2002), and shows three related phage genomes one above the other. Different classes of genes have been given different colors, while the strength of the red shaded cross-links indicates the percentage identity of the linked genes. [Read More]

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.59 are now available from the downloads page on the Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). Platforms/Deployment We currently support Python 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 and also test under Jython 2.5 (which does not cover NumPy). Please note that this release will not work on Python 2.4 Most functionality is also working under Python 3.1 and 3.2 (including modules using NumPy), and under PyPy (excluding our NumPy dependencies). [Read More]

One of the new things coming in Biopython 1.59 is improved chromosome diagrams, something you may have seen via Twitter. I’ve just been updating the Biopython Tutorial (current version here, PDF) to include an example drawing this: Here’s a PDF version too. This example just parses the Arabidopsis thaliana GenBank files to get the chromosome lengths and the tRNA gene placements. There are so many tRNA on the forward strand of Chr I that their labels are forced to overlap. [Read More]

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.58 are available from the downloads page on the Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). A new interface and parsers for the PAML (Phylogenetic Analysis by Maximum Likelihood) package of programs, supporting codeml, baseml and yn00 as well as a Python re-implementation of chi2 was added as the Bio.Phylo.PAML module. Bio.SeqIO now includes read and write support for the SeqXML, a simple XML format offering basic annotation support. [Read More]

The Biopython community is pleased to announce the release of Biopython 1.57. Source distributions and Windows installers are available from the downloads page on the Biopython website and from the Python Package Index. Bio.SeqIO now includes an index_db() function which extends the existing indexing functionality to allow indexing many files, and more importantly this keeps the index on disk in a simple SQLite3 database rather than in memory in a Python dictionary. [Read More]

Great news: Google announced today that the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this summer’s Google Summer of Code! GSoC is a Google-sponsored student internship program for open-source projects, open to students from around the world (not just US residents). Students are paid a $5000 USD stipend to work as a developer on an open-source project for the summer. For more on GSoC, see GSoC 2011 FAQ. [Read More]

Due to a huge influx of spam across all OBF wikis, we are in the process of locking down new user account creation and adding OpenID logins for the OBF wikis (BioPerl example). User account creation via the old login system will be disabled and OpenID will be the default path for new accounts so users to make wiki changes. This currently appears to have cut the incidence of spam significantly. [Read More]

The OBF now has a sparkly new Redmine instance running on Amazon EC2, thanks to efforts from Chris Dagdigian and Jason Stajich (with some admin help from yours truly). Bugs and user names (along with email contacts) from our old Bugzilla v2 server have been migrated over, though some links need to be fixed. Redmine is a project management web application that has several nice features over other systems, including issue tracking, multiple project management, wikis, forums, and calendaring. [Read More]