BOSC is returning to ISMB in 2021, after a successful partnership with Galaxy for the first Bioinformatics Community Conference last year ( BCC2020 online). Originally slated to take place in Lyon, France, ISMB/ECCB 2021 announced today that the conference will be virtual. This news may be disappointing to some, but for others it offers an opportunity to participate in a conference that they would not have been able to travel to attend.

CollaborationFest 2020 As part of BCC2020, the first Bioinformatics Community Conference, the Galaxy Community Conference (GCC) and the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) co-sponsored an online CollaborationFest, a 2 (or 4) day collaborative work event where our community gathered virtually to contribute code, documentation, training materials, and challenging analysis problems and use cases.

The OBF has two sets of domain names available for adoption by a non-profit or open source project: biows.org, biows.com, biows.net and biocpp.org, biocpp.com, biocpp.net These domains were registered and donated to us with bio-web-services (biows) and bio-c-plus-plus (BioC++ or BioCPP) in mind, but we’ve failed to find a good home for them.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open-source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Dr. Laura Ación , a researcher at the Instituto de Cálculo, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina . She is also one of the co-founders of

BOSC 2021 BOSC 2021 is over! Part of ISMB/ECCB 2021 online, BOSC took place July 29-30, 2021, with CoFest following on July 31 - Aug 1. We thank all the participants and our sponsors, who enabled us to grant free registration to 20 participants around the world! Check out the complete BOSC 2021 talk schedule, and videos of all the talks! The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) has been held annually since 2000.

OBF was accepted as a mentoring organisation for Google Summer of Code this year. It was another good year for OBF, with Kai Blin, Michael R. Crusoe, Sarthak Sehgal, and Yo Yehudi as administrators.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community.

Biopython 1.78 has been released and is available from our website and PyPI. The main change is that Bio.Alphabet is no longer used. In some cases you will now have to specify expected letters, molecule type (DNA, RNA, protein), or gap character explicitly. Please consult the updated Tutorial and API documentation for guidance. This simplification has sped up many Seq object methods.

Online. By at least a factor of two. Our recent article entitled Lessons learnt from organizing a virtual conference discusses some of our technology choices and how we leveraged them to put on a successful online meeting. That article touches briefly on some of the challenges we faced, but it doesn’t fully convey how much work it was–both in advance and during the event.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Event Fellowship program aims to promote diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science practices in the biological research community. Pengfei Fan, a researcher from Queen Mary University of London, was supported to participate in CLEO 2020 by this fellowship granted to him in the application round-1 of 2020.

We are glad to announce that the call for applications for the OBF Event Fellowship is now open. The deadline for this round is 1 October 2020. Applications should be submitted via this Google Form.