[BioRuby] Contributing to BioRuby

[Andreas Biegert]

Hi,

I am a graduate student in bioinformatics at the University  of Tuebingen,
Germany. In the last three years, two bioinformatics students and me have
been working at the  Max-Planck-Institute for Developmental Biology in
Tuebingen on the development of a  Bioinformatics Toolkit for  Protein
Sequence Analysis (http://toolkit.tuebingen.mpg.de, Publication:
http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/34/suppl_2/W335).  The  Toolkit
classes and modules are written entirely in Ruby and the web part is based
on the RubyOnRails web-framework. Currently, we are in the process of
streamlining the codebase and workflow. Since BioRuby offers such a
convenient access to common bioinformatics utilities and functionality we
would like to use it in our Toolkit, for example for sequence parsing and
reformatting.  Unfortunately some of the functionality we need, such as the
sequence formats that are used throughout the tools in the Toolkit seem to
be yet unsupported by BioRuby (e.g. CLUSTAL, A2M, A3M). Would it be possible
for me to contribute to BioRuby and extend such functionality? Thanks for
providing the bioinformatics community with this great library!

Best Regards,
Andreas