BIOSCI, also known as Bionet, is a set of electronic communication forum used by life scientists around the world. It includes the Bionet

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

newsgroups and parallel e-mail lists, with public archives since 1992 a
www.bio.net
BIOSCI/Bionet provides public,

open access Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 definition), or libre op ...

biology news and discussion for areas such as molecular biology methods and reagents,

bioinformatics software The list of bioinformatics software tools can be split up according to the license used: *List of proprietary bioinformatics software *List of open-source bioinformatics software Alternatively, here is a categorization according to the respective b ...

and

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of data analysis, mathematical modeling and computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer science, biology, and big data, the field also has fo ...

, toxicology, and several organism communities including yeast, C.elegans and annelida (worms), the plant arabidopsis, fruitfly, maize (corn), and others. BIOSCI/Bionet was started as part of the

GenBank The GenBank sequence database is an open access, annotated collection of all publicly available nucleotide sequences and their protein translations. It is produced and maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI; a part ...

public biosequence database project by Intelligenetics at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in the mid-1980s, in collaboration with Martin Bishop and

Michael Ashburner Michael Ashburner (born 23 May 1942) is a biologist and Emeritus Professor in the Department of Genetics at University of Cambridge. He is also the former joint-head and co-founder of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the European Mo ...

in the

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

. It latter moved to the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...

's MRC

Rosalind Franklin Rosalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 192016 April 1958) was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, co ...

Centre for Genomics Research (RFCGR). In 2005, with the closing of RFCGR, BIOSCI/Bionet moved to

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universit ...

Biology Department's IUBio Archive. As one of the earliest

bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data, in particular when the data sets are large and complex. As an interdisciplinary field of science, bioinformatics combi ...

community projects on the Internet,

acquired the bio.net domain and the Usenet hierarchy of Bionet for promoting open access communications among bioscientists, in conjunction with public biology data distribution.

, co-founder of BIOSCI with Dave Kristofferson of

(Intelligenetics), writes of its origins

... in the early 1980s, Martin Bishop and I ran an email news service for a sequence analysis service that we ran on the Cambridge IBM3084Q mainframe. I was also a user of MOLGEN at Stanford, and there Dave Kristofferson ran an internal bulletin board using ANU News. We combined forces to start the Bulletin boards.

Bionet has provided open access, Internet news groups and discussion for many thousands of life scientists for 30 years. As of 2019 April, discussion lists are suspended, but ar
archived for reading
A new supporting organization is sought to continue Bionet into its fourth decade, as Indiana University will no longer support this public service to biologists. The

hierarchy of Bionet.* includes bionet.announce (general biology announcements), and research communities of bionet.microbiology, bionet.molbio.methds-reagnts, bionet.neuroscience, bionet.genome.arabidopsis, bionet.plants.education, bionet.drosophila, bionet.biology.computational plus 50 other active areas of discussion.

References

External links

BIOSCI/BionetIUBio Archive
{{DEFAULTSORT:Biosci Biology websites Bioinformatics Internet forums