wEMBOSS and wrappers4EMBOSS

Volunteers asked to join the maintenance and development team

wEMBOSS is a Web interface for EMBOSS that provides the user with a personal data space server-side, where he can manage his data and analysis results in projects [1]. The companion package wrappers4EMBOSS allows to integrate under EMBOSS 3th party software like BLAST, fastA and CLUSTAL and to use MRS as sequence databank access method.

The wEMBOSS+wrappers4EMBOSS development team consisted of Martin Sarachu from the Argentinian EMBnet Node, and Marc Colet and Guy Bottu from the Belgian EMBnet Node. Unfortunately, Martin Sarachu tragically died from cancer on 9 September 2007. At the Belgian side Marc Colet retired as professor at the University of Brussels on 1 October 2008 and Guy Bottu is not working for BEN anymore since 1 May 2009, because the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office decided to cut the financing of BEN. Marc is not willing to continue working on the project and Guy is unsure whether he will continue to have time to spend. Marc and Guy however do not want to see this useful software lost for the bioinformatics community.

Therefore they are searching volunteers to take over the development. The idea is that the new member(s) should join the project at SourceForge and start working on wEMBOSS. To make the take-over easy Marc has recently released a version of wEMBOSS maintained as project under Eclipse and with an as much as possible cleaned up and debugged code. During the first six months Marc Colet will remain available for advice, but will ultimately leave the team. Guy will keep working on wrappers4EMBOSS as long as possible, but in the medium term the new member(s) should also collaborate on/take over the development of wrappers4EMBOSS.

For any further details please contact Marc Colet (marcrcolet@gmail.com).

References

Martín Sarachu and Marc Colet. wEMBOSS: a web interface for EMBOSS. Bioinformatics 2005, 21(4):540-541.