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 (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...

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 nominally copyrightable publications are delivered to readers free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined (according to the 2001 de ...

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

bioinformatics software {{short description, none The list of bioinformatics Bioinformatics () is an interdisciplinary field of science that develops methods and Bioinformatics software, software tools for understanding biological data, especially when the data set ...

and

computational biology Computational biology refers to the use of techniques in computer science, data analysis, mathematical modeling and Computer simulation, computational simulations to understand biological systems and relationships. An intersection of computer sci ...

, 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 par ...

public biosequence database project by Intelligenetics at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

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

Michael Ashburner Michael Ashburner (23 May 1942 – 7 July 2023) was an English biologist and Professor in the Department of Genetics at University of Cambridge. He also served as joint-head and co-founder of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) of the ...

in the

University of Cambridge The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209, the University of Cambridge is the List of oldest universities in continuous operation, wo ...

. 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 Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

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

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a state university system, system of Public university, public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. The system has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration o ...

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

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

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