.NET Bio

Register for .NET Bio Workshop!The great thing about working for Microsoft is that there is SO much going on in so many disparate areas. Just this week I learned that we have an open source API and SDK focused on bioinformatics research. 

A quick peek at the Programming Guide gives this overview:

Application developers can use .NET Bio Framework to perform a wide range of tasks, including:
  • Import DNA, RNA, or protein sequences from files with a variety of standard data formats, including FASTA, FASTQ, GenBank, GFF, and BED.
    This document focuses on DNA sequences, but you use similar procedures for the other sequence types.
  • Construct sequences from scratch.
  • Manipulate sequences in various ways, such as adding or removing elements or generating a complement.
  • Analyze sequences using algorithms such as Smith-Waterman and Needleman-Wunsch.
  • Submit sequence data to remote Web sites—such as a Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST) Web site—for analysis.
  • Output sequence data in any supported file format, regardless of the input format.

OK, so they pretty much lost me at “RNA,” but despite that, I did the quick walkthrough without a hitch and played with the cool WPF visualizations in the Sequence Assembler sample. For those of you in the bioinformatics field, it seems like an awesome tool. 

And it get’s awesomer… there’s a free two day workshop being held at Cornell University next Wednesday and Thursday from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. to enable attendees to build their own bioinformatics applications on Windows.

When: Mar 22-23, 2012 9am - 5 pm

Where: Rm. 655, Rhodes Hall

Register now

The sessions will be a combination of lectures and hands-on labs, so you’re encouraged to bring your laptop with Visual Studio 2010 installed (check out DreamSpark if you’re a student, or just download Visual C# 2010 Express free).  A detailed agenda and directions are available at the registration page.