Biopython (www.biopython.org) is an international collaboration to collect and produce open source bioinformatics tools written in the Python programming language. Founded in 1999 it now has users and developers from four different continents. Biopython is one of the projects developed under the umbrella of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (www.open-bio.org).

This is an exciting time in the Biopython. We are approaching the 1.0 release. The distribution includes interfaces to query local and distributed bioinformatics tools and databases, data structures for manipulating biological resources, a generalized parsing framework which unifies the many flat-file formats, libraries for working with different database systems, and servers to provide remote access to these services.

The presentation will start with an overview of the Biopython project then show how the different aspects can be used to build a bioinformatics platform for a research group. It will end with pointers to other Python projects in the life sciences, including projects in structural biology and chemical informatics.