Friday, October 8, 2010

BioJava's Google Summer of Code summary

Today a slighlty belated summary of what happened at the Google Summer of Code at the BioJava project:

Our two students Mark Chapman and Jianjiong Gao did an amazing job on their two projects "All Java Multiple Sequence Alignment" (MSA) and "Identification and Classification of Posttranslational Modification of Proteins" (PTM).

For Multiple Sequence Alignments we now have a flexible and multi-threaded MSA implementation that works in linear space and that, as an option, allows the users to define anchors that are used in the build up of the multiple alignment. The code is available as part of the new biojava3-alignment module.

The Posttranslational Modification module (biojava3-protmod) can detect three different types of protein modifications in protein structures. It comes with an XML file & Java data structures to store information about different types of protein modifications, and contains entries from RESID, PDBCC and PSI-MOD. There is also a visualisation component to display cross linked PTM on a sequence viewer.

Both Mark and Jianjiong have expressed their interest in maintaining and further developing their modules and I am looking forward to interacting more with them in the future. I want to thank the Mentors and Co-Mentors Peter Rose, Kyle Ellrott and Scooter Willis for their help and guidance for the projects, without them this would not have been possible. Thanks also to Robert Buels and the Open Bioinformatics Foundation for organizing our applications for GSoC and last, but not least, Google for sponsoring this Summer of Code.

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