Join us for an open developer forum exploring how R and Rust can work together in bioinformatics and Bioconductor development. Organised and hosted by Lluís Revilla (Bioconductor Community Advisory Board), this online session will discuss technical and practical aspects of using Rust alongside R - discussing extendr, Rust-based package development, and real-world use cases. Whether you’re Rust-curious or already experimenting, all are welcome.

Exploring R and Rust in Bioinformatics – Online Developer Forum, 28 July 2025

In March 2025, Bioconductor marked an exciting milestone—our first in-person course on the African continent. Hosted by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Nairobi, this five-day workshop brought together 32 researchers for hands-on training in genomic data analysis using R and Bioconductor.

Bioconductor in Africa: Highlights from Our First In-Person Course

Introduction   This blog post was written during CoFest (CollaborationFest) that took place after the 2025 Galaxy Bioconductor Community Conference, held this year at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York.

Bringing Bioconductor to Galaxy: A CoFest Collaboration

Bioconductor’s community chat is moving from Slack to

 Zulip

on

 Monday 2 June 2025

. The transition ensures long-term access to discussions and better reflects our open-source values. Why We’re Moving to Zulip Our Slack Pro subscription ends on Sunday 1 June. Switching to the free tier would mean losing older messages — including valuable conversations, decisions, and shared knowledge.

Bioconductor is Moving from Slack to Zulip for Community Chat

We’re pleased to announce a new collaboration between the Bioconductor Training Committee and Physalia Courses, aimed at expanding access to high-quality training in bioinformatics and computational biology. This partnership builds on shared goals around education, community engagement, and inclusivity.

Bioconductor Training partners with Physalia Courses

In the beginning …

… there was a 9-track tape shipped from Bell Labs. S would be installed for “unix”. Extensions could be programmed in Fortran. I started using this around 1985. S REPORT presaged Sweave and knitr: troff, eqn, pic could be interlarded with S computations. Here’s a taste of inputs and outputs for S REPORT.

Ask and you shall receive

Introduction   Open source provides an accessible platform for individuals to develop and refine their skills while collaborating on real-world projects. For tech enthusiasts with little to no experience, contributing to open-source projects is a great way to gain hands-on experience, learn from experts, and become part of a global community. One program that actively supports newcomers in open source is Outreachy.

Outreachy December 2024 Interns with Bioconductor

Introduction

A major update to ggplot2 (version 4.0.0) is expected around

 mid-to-late July 2025

. It brings a significant internal change, replacing most of the S3 backend with the newer S7 object system. While this improves long-term maintainability and extensibility, it may break Bioconductor packages that depend on ggplot2, especially those that customise how plots are built or styled.

Bioconductor and ggplot2 4.0.0: What’s Changing and How to Prepare

Introduction

The EDAM ontology is used to provide conceptual organization of resources in major initiatives like ELIXIR bio.tools and Galaxy. Bioconductor’s methods and data are tagged using an ad hoc terminologic hierarchy called biocViews.

Tagging Bioconductor packages with EDAM

From April 23rd to 25th, 2025, we hosted the first Bioconductor microbiome course in Brazil, a three-afternoon workshop held at the Interunits Post-Graduate Program of Bioinformatics at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) (link) in Belo Horizonte.

Bioconductor community blog