The first round of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation travel fellowship program has granted funds to three open source bioinformatics software developers to help them attend the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) 2016 in Orlando, Florida, this July.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is participating in the Google Summer of Code 2016 program, and last Friday the selected students were announced. Congratulations to all of you, and welcome. I also want to use this opportunity to thank all students who applied. Resources are limited and your proposals did not make it easy to select our finalists.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation is pleased to announce a gift of USD 18,125 from the Phyloinformatics Summer of Code toward the OBF travel fellowship program. The program, announced earlier this year on March 1, aims to increase diverse participation at events promoting open source bioinformatics software development and open science in the biological research community.

The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is a two day meeting focused on open source bioinformatics. We aim to encourage and support a friendly, open and productive community that helps us work together to answer hard biological questions. We’ll get together this summer, July 8-9, in Orlando, Florida. Abstracts for BOSC 2016 talks and posters are due this Friday, April 1st.

We’re delighted to announce the keynote speakers for the Bioinformatics Open Source Conference, BOSC 2016: Jennifer Gardy Dr. Jennifer Gardy is both a scientist and science communicator.

We are very pleased to announce our new Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) Travel Fellowship program. The program is designed to enable people, whether long-standing members of our community or newcomers, to participate in eligible events for which costs would otherwise be prohibitive.

Call for Abstracts for the 17th Annual Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC 2016), a Special Interest Group (SIG) of ISMB 2016.

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF) is pleased to announce that we’ve finally entered the 21st century and upgraded our membership form from paper (yep!) to an online form. Membership in the OBF is free, and is open to anyone who has attended BOSC or can otherwise demonstrate commitment to OBF’s goals.

Source distributions and Windows installers for Biopython 1.66 are now available from the downloads page on the official Biopython website and from the Python Package Index (PyPI). This release of Biopython supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4 and 3.5, although support for Python 2.6 is now deprecated.

We are pleased to announce the release of BioRuby 1.5.0. This new release includes support of recent Ruby versions (Ruby 2.0.0, 2.1 and 2.2),  improvement of codes, and bug fixes. Here is a brief summary of changes. Ruby 2.0.0, 2.1, 2.2 support. Some features are removed because of remote service discontinuance or difficulty of code maintenance. Refactoring of code. Bio::SPTR is renamed as Bio::UniProtKB. Bug fixes.

Every year, BOSC includes a panel discussion that offers all attendees the chance to engage in conversation with the panelists and each other.