Call for Abstracts for the 15th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2014), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB 2014.

Open Bio is officially a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014! See Google’s official announcement for more details on what this means in general. What’s next? Google’s GSoC timeline lays out what we need to do as a mentoring organization during the coming weeks. Students can apply March 10–21 through the official GSoC 2014 website to work with OBF.

On Friday, OBF applied to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014. The core of our application to Google is our list of project ideas and our team of mentors supporting them. (We also have a separate page for general information about GSoC and OBF’s involvement.) As another way to interact with potential GSoC students, we’ve created a Google Plus page for OBF and a G+ community for OBF’s GSoC activities.

Google Summer of Code is on again for 2014, and OBF is once again applying as a mentoring organization. Participating in GSoC as an organization is very competitive, and we will need your help in gathering a good set of ideas and potential mentors. Since OBF is an umbrella organization covering several member projects, most of these GSoC ideas will likely be associated with a specific Bio* community.

Update: The deadline for responding has been extended to January 25. The 2014 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is coming up soon. The published timeline puts the mentoring organization applications from Feb 3 to 14. OBF participated on behalf of our member projects in 2010, 2011, and 2012. Those participations were both important and successful.

Thanks to those who participated in the BOSC 2014 Keynote Competition! Our winner is Manuel Corpas, who correctly surmised Philip Bourne: https://twitter.com/manuelcorpas/status/412520369044463616 (In fact, we had already confirmed Philip Bourne as our second keynote speaker before his new job at NIH was announced.) Congratulations, Manuel, on winning free admission to BOSC 2014!

The latest BioPerl release (v1.6.923) is now available on CPAN. This is a point release to address a few bugs, as well as push out the recent code updates that Francisco Ossandón has made to improve Windows support and improve Bio::Location (among other bits and pieces). Contributing to the release: Francisco Ossandón Brian Osborne Dave Messina Carnë Draug Chris Fields Benjamin Warren Enjoy!

We’re pleased to officially confirm that one of the two keynote speakers for the 15th annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference ( BOSC 2014) will be C. Titus Brown, as he announced on Twitter recently: In recognition of the growing use of Twitter and social media within science as a way of connecting across geographical divides, we’re announcing a Twitter competition to guess who is scheduled to give the second keynote at BOSC 2014 in

Agenda Venue: to be held by conference call on Dec 12, 2013, 12pm EDT (17:00 UTC)  Dial-in Number: 1-605-475-5950 (US Midwest)

Agenda Venue: to be held by conference call on April 9, 2013, 1.30pm EDT (17:30 UTC)  Dial-in Number: 1-605-475-5950 (Midwest)

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.63 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and ( soon ) from the Python Package Index (PyPI). The current version removed the requirement of the 2to3 library. This was made possible by dropping Python 2.5 (and Jython 2.5). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6 and