[EMBOSS] EMBOSS Funding and New developments

[Peter Rice]

Dear EMBOSS Users and Developers

We bring you great news - EMBOSS is funded in full by the BBSRC
"Bioinformatics and Biological Resources" Fund. We now have money for
Alan Bleasby and 2 other positions (Jon Ison and Mahmut Uludag) from 1st
May until the end of 2011.

The core aims of the funding proposal were to continue support,
maintenance and development of EMBOSS, and to provide extensive online
training materials for users, developers and system administrators using
text from a series of books to be published by Cambridge University Press.

We are also explicitly targeting areas where we see EMBOSS can be
expanded:

* Richer data content in EMBOSS outputs leading to major improvements
   in the integration and visualisation of results in browsers.

* Processing many more data fields in EMBOSS inputs (taxonomy,
   genes, GO terms, cross-references, keywords.

* Extending and improving database access: better indexing, query
   language support and combining searches across multiple databases,
   support for non-sequence data resources and new data access methods

* Scaling up the libraries and adding new applications to support the
   data volumes generated by next-generation sequencing runs. We
   anticipate many more users will be working with short read data
   mapped to reference sequences over the next few years.

* We aim to add at least 100 new applications in these 3 years.
   Suggestions for new applications are very welcome.

* Release 6.1.0 will appear, as usual, on 15th July.

* Major work on new developments and new library code will start from
   August.

We hope to meet many of you at BOSC/ISMB/ECCB in Stockholm at the end of
this month, We will arrange a lunchtime "Birds of a Feather" session
at ISMB to discuss the needs of users over the next 3 years.

regards,

Peter Rice