[Biojava-dev] interested in Bio Java

[Thomas Down]

Once upon a time, Cyrous wrote:
> To Whom It May Concern,
> 
> My name is Cyrous Jame'. I finished my undergraduate study at UC
> Berkeley less than a year ago in Applied Mathematics and Computer
> Science. I have become increasingly interested in BioInformatics and
> considering the fact that I don't get to code that much at work, I was
> wondering what are the ways I could contribute to BioJava in my free
> time.

Hi Cyrous,

We're always happy to have more developers on board, whether you're
interested in improving some of the existing code, or working on
something new.

Current bioinformatics really divides up into two areas: the first
one is `librarian' activities: storing, cataloging, and querying
the existing biological data.  The other is the `analytical' side,
developing new methods to extract information from the data.  Given
your background, I guess you might be more interested in the
analytical area, so you might want to look at the BioJava dynamic
programming toolkit and related pieces of analysis code.

The other thing to remember is that the current BioJava code base
is rather centred around working with sequence data.  There are
many other types of interesting data in bioinformatics: macromolecular
structures, gene and protein expression data, and many others.
It would be great to have some APIs in BioJava for working with
these data.

Anyway, good luck, and I hope you find something that catches
your interest.  If you've got any questions about the code then
there's alway someone on this mailing list who can discuss it.

     Thomas.