On July 10, in Boston, the External Research division of Microsoft Research introduced the Microsoft Biology Initiative, resources designed to help biological scientists and programmers conduct research more efficiently and affordably. These include the first post-beta release of the Microsoft Biology Foundation (MBF), a language-neutral bioinformatics tool kit built as an extension to the Microsoft .NET Framework.

In addition to a new genome assembler, performance enhancements, and other improvements, MBF builds upon the vision and goals that drove the development of the beta versions. Those included a commitment to community involvement, extensibility, cross-platform and interoperable functionality, language neutrality, and support for best practices.

While there are other libraries of biological functionality available, MBF supports universally accepted standards of the bioinformatics community and implements a range of unique functionality derived from original Microsoft research. The code for MBF and supporting documents is available on CodePlex[RK1] .

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For the full story check out the External Research Blog at: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/msr_er/