Obf

Hi all,

You may have noticed we’re trying out using the wiki for Biopython cookbook entries. It’s a new idea so at the moment there are only a few ‘recipes’ on offer. If you have some tricks you find yourself using time and again to solve a problem why not share them? Similarly, if you find yourself coming up against a problem you can’t seem to solve easily with Biopython’s tools send a message to one of the mailing lists proposing it as a cookbook example and someone just might solve it for you!

We are pleased to announce Biopython release 1.50, featuring some significant additions since Biopython 1.49 was released late last year.

GenomeDiagram by Leighton Pritchard has been integrated into Biopython as the Bio.Graphics.GenomeDiagram module.

A new module Bio.Motif has been added, which is intended to replace the existing Bio.AlignAce and Bio.MEME modules. Also have a look at Bio.SwissProt and Bio.ExPASy and their revised parsers.

As noted in a previous news posting, Bio.SeqIO can now read and write FASTQ and QUAL files used in second generation sequencing work. In connection with this, our SeqRecord object has a new dictionary attribute, letter_annotations, for per-letter-annotation information like sequence quality scores or secondary structure predictions. Also, the SeqRecord object can now be sliced to give a new SeqRecord covering just part of the sequence.

This is a reminder from the BOSC 2009 Organizing committee that abstracts for BOSC are due on Monday, April 13.

Just to let you all know, Biopython is now on twitter. And in case you missed the OBF announcement last month, so is the O|B|F News feed (and BioPerl). You are welcome to follow us (all) on twitter.

I’d also like to remind people there are news feeds for the Biopython news posts (as RDF, RSS, RSS2, or Atom format). We’re planning to have these automatically echoed onto twitter in future… (update) …and that seems to be working now :)

Those of you doing next generation sequencing may be pleased to know that the next release of Biopython is expected to include support for reading and writing FASTQ and QUAL files within our Bio.SeqIO interface. These formats are used for traditional Sanger capillary sequencing, and Roche 454 sequencing (Roche provide tools to convert from their binary SFF files) with PHRED quality scores. Solexa/Illumina sequencers produce a FASTQ variant where the quality scores are encoded differently, and this is also supported.

An Application Note describing Biopython has recently been accepted for publication in the Oxford Journal Bioinformatics. An advance copy of the Open Access article is available online:

P.J.A. Cock, T. Antao, J.T. Chang, B.A. Chapman, C.J. Cox, A. Dalke, I. Friedberg, T. Hamelryck, F. Kauff, B. Wilczynski and M.J.L. de Hoon (2009) Biopython: freely available Python tools for computational molecular biology and bioinformatics. Bioinformatics, doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btp163

Initially for evaluation purposes only, Giovanni and Bartek have setup a mirror of Biopython on GitHub, which is automatically updated from the OBF hosted Biopython CVS repository. See our git migration wiki page for details. If this is favorably received, then moving Biopython from CVS to git seems likely at some point this year.

Originally, all the OBF hosted projects used CVS for their source code repositories. At the start of 2008, BioPerl and BioJava moved over to Subversion (SVN), followed by BioSQL. Biopython was originally going to do the same, but this didn’t actually happen. Having all the Bio* projects using the same version control system would have simplified server administration for the OBF, but using SVN wouldn’t really have made that much difference to Biopython development. Discussion on the Biopython development mailing list has since shifted towards next-generation distributed version control systems like git or Bazaar.

A wiki page for collecting ideas, possible projects, prerequisites, possible solution approaches, mentors, other people or channels to contact for more information or to bounce ideas off of, etc. has been setup:

http://open-bio.org/wiki/Google_Summer_Code_2009

Please forward as appropriate and forgive multiple postings.

Call for Abstracts for the 2009 Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2009

An ISMB 2009 Special Interest Group (SIG) Date: June 27-28, 2009 Location: Stockholm, Sweden URL: /wiki/BOSC_2009 Abstract submission via EasyChair: https://www.easychair.org/login.cgi?conf=bosc2009

Important Dates Monday, April 13: Abstract deadline May 1, 2009: Notification of accepted abstracts May 15, 2009: Early Registration Discount Cut-off date June 27-28, 2009: BOSC 2009

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is sponsored by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (O|B|F), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development within the biological research community. To be considered for acceptance, software systems representing the central topic in a presentation submitted to BOSC must be licensed with a recognized Open Source License, and be freely available for download in source code form.

Google is committed to run the Summer of Code program again this year. It will be for the 5th time.

In broad strokes, the program funds what you might call remote summer internships for students to contribute to an open-source software project. Projects (or umbrella organizations) wishing to participate in the program apply during the organization application period (March 9-13 in 2009). Those accepted into the program provide project ideas and supply mentors that guide the work on those. Students apply to a project within the program with specific project ideas, based on those suggested or based on their own idea, get ranked by the mentors of the project, and those accepted into the program get paired up with mentors. Projects are chiefly about programming, the coding period is 3 months (Jun-Aug), and there is no travel required by either student or mentor. The program is global; other than the US trade restrictions that Google is under, there are no restrictions as to where student or mentor reside. The main motivations behind the program are to recruit new contributors to open-source projects, and to produce more open-source code. See the program FAQs for more information.