Microsoft releases version 1.0 of bioinformatics toolkit

Microsoft has announced the release of version 1.0 of its language-neutral bioinformatics toolkit, known as the Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF). In a post on Microsoft's Port 25 blog, Peter Galli, Open Source Community Manager for Microsoft's Platform Strategy Group, says that, the toolkit is initially aimed at the area of Genomics research.

According to the project's site, the toolkit, built as an extension to the Microsoft .NET Framework, currently "implements a range of parsers for common bioinformatics file formats; a range of algorithms for manipulating DNA, RNA, and protein sequences; and a set of connectors to biological web services such as NCBI BLAST (the U.S. National Center for Biotechnology Information’s Basic Local Alignment Search Tool)". The project is coordinated by a Technology Advisory Board which consists of members from Microsoft, industry and the academic community.

More details about the release can be found in the change log. Version 1.0 of the Microsoft Biology Foundation is available to download from the Microsoft Research portal and documentation is provided. Source code for the Microsoft Biology Foundation is hosted on the company's CodePlex project site and is released under the OSI-approved Microsoft Public License.

(crve)