Moderator: Sohel Merchant, Bioinformatics Software Engineer, Northwestern University

Bioinformatics is the application of computer technology to the management and analysis of biological data. It is an interdisciplinary research area that is the interface between the biological and computational sciences. The eventual goal of bioinformatics is to decode the genetic information and uncover the wealth of biological information hidden in the mass of data and obtain a clearer insight into the fundamental biology of organisms. This new knowledge will have tremendous impacts on fields as varied as human health, agriculture, the environment, energy and biotechnology.

Perl has been language of choice and has been widely used by bioinformaticians. But, in the past few years people have started realizing the elegance and conciseness of Ruby. The introduction of Rails has generated a lot of interest in using Ruby and Rails for bioinformatics. BioRuby is one such open source Ruby project which has received public attention. But, it is pretty new and would needs a lot of work to take it to the level of BioPerl. The goal of this BOF is to share how different groups are using Ruby and Rails in their respective organizations. We would like to hold a discussion on some of the existing applications and proposals for new tools/packages written in Ruby/Rails which would help bring Ruby/Rails in mainstream of bioinformatics and enable easy adoption by others.