.NET Bio: the new name for Microsoft Biology Foundation and now open source
Microsoft Research is putting .NET Bio, a bioinformatics toolkit into the Outercurve Foundation, allowing community involvement in the future of this open-source project.
See the full post by Simon Mercer describing the transfer to Outercurve as a new Research Accelerator and the new functionality being included in this release.
There is a training event this week on .NET BIO (10/20-21) at UCSD.
The Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF) has undergone a significant transformation since it was first released. Over time, it’s become clear that a new name was also in order. So today, I am pleased to announce that MBF will now be known as .NET Bio. In addition to the new name, .NET Bio will also have a new location: the Outercurve Foundation. This move is the next logical step in the life of the project: transferring its ownership to a nonprofit foundation that is dedicated to open-source software underscores our community-led philosophy; while Microsoft will continue to contribute to the code, it will do so as one among a growing community of users and contributors.
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Users can perform a range of tasks with .NET Bio, including:
- Importing DNA, RNA, or protein sequences from files with a variety of standard data formats, including FASTA, FASTQ, GFF, GenBank, and BED.
- Constructing sequences from scratch.
- Manipulating sequences in various ways, such as adding or removing elements or generating a complement.
- Analyzing sequences by using algorithms such as Smith-Waterman and Needleman-Wunsch.
- Submitting sequence data to remote websites (for example, a Basic Local Alignment Search Tool [BLAST] website) for analysis.
- Outputting sequence data in any supported file format, regardless of the input format.