Breaking News

Keynote Audio Online
Dr. Dobb's TechNetCast is featuring audio versions of some of the keynotes from the O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference.  

20 Hackers + 1 Whiteboard + 1 Windowless Room = Open Bio Database Access (OBDA)
The first-ever biohackathon wrapped up at the O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology conference, with a new specification for accessing biological sequence databases across multiple languages and platforms, reports GenomeWeb. 

O'Reilly's Bioinformatics Conference: Photos from Day Three
O'Reilly's Bioinformatics Conference wrapped up with more talks, book signings, a field trip to a missile silo, and a snow storm in the desert.  

Lincoln Stein's Keynote: Building a Bioinformatics Nation
Addressing bioinformatics data providers, Lincoln Stein describes the benefits of moving towards a formal Web services model.  

O'Reilly's Bioinformatics Conference: Photos from Day Two
Pictures from Tuesday's events at O'Reilly's Bioninformatics Conference  

Ewan Birney's Keynote: A Case for Open Source Bioinformatics
Ewan Birney delivered a rousing keynote on Open Source Bioinformatics, describing the emerging discipline and telling why bioinformatics software should be open source.  

O'Reilly's Bioinformatics Conference: Photos from Day One
O'Reilly's Bioinformatics Conference got off to a start Tuesday with keynote speeches from open source bioinformatics advocate Ewan Birney and Perl hacker and biological researcher Lincoln Stein.  

Bioinformatics Hackathon Making Progress
Conference co-chair Nathan Torkington reports that the hackathon is going well, and a summary document of what has been accomplished so far is now online. Representatives from BioPerl, BioPython, BioJava, and BioRuby have agreed on a cross-language, cross- platform spec for accessing biological sequence databases.  

Bioinformatics Poster Session
The O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference will feature an informal poster session. Participation is open to all speakers and registered attendees of the conference. This poster event provides a relaxed opportunity for attendees to learn about each others' work, and to meet face-to-face. 

 Related Articles

An Interview with Dr. Leroy Hood  We spoke to Dr. Leroy Hood about systems biology, bioinformatics, and the future of biological research. Dr. Hood is the founder of the Institute for Systems Biology and will be delivering the closing keynote at O'Reilly's upcoming Bioinformatics Technology Conference.  [O'Reilly Network]

Does Publicly Funded Research Have to Result in Open Source Code?  Read two opposing viewpoints on whether all software created by publicly funded research should be licensed as open source.  [O'Reilly Network]

DEODAS: A DEgenerate Oligonucleotide Design and Analysis System  An introduction to DEODAS, a Linux-based system for designing and electronically analyzing consensus-degenerate oligonucleotides, which was developed by integrating several open source software tools.  [O'Reilly Network]

Beginning Bioinformatics  James Tisdall's new book is great for biochemists eager to get into the bioinformatics world, but what about us Perl progrmammers? In this article, we turn the tables, and ask what your average Perl programmer needs to know to get into this exciting new growth area.  [Perl.com]

Bioinformatics Meets Mac OS X  Many important bioinformatics applications that previously existed only for Unix platforms are now being ported to Mac OS X.  [Mac DevCenter]

An Interview with Lincoln Stein  We recently spoke to Lincoln Stein about the state of bioinformatics. Lincoln will be a keynote speaker at the upcoming O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology Conference.  [O'Reilly Network]

Speedup at What Cost?  Two genes that do the same thing are said to be homologs, and sequence-based homology searches with tools like BLAST are the most common tasks performed in bioinformatics, though the algorithmic details are poorly understood. Christopher Dwan examines the trade-offs involved in using tools based on heuristic algorithms. [O'Reilly Network]

 Conference Weblogs

Bruce Stewart's Weblog
Bioinformatics Conference--Day 4 Wrap-Up
The O'Reilly Bioinformatics Technology conference concluded today here in Tucson, and it seems that everyone is walking away happy.  [O'Reilly Network Weblogs]