Over the last year BioJava has undergone a major re-write. It has been modularized into small, re-usable components and a number of new features have been added. The new approach, modeled after the apache commons, minimizes dependencies and allows for easier contribution of new components.
At the present the main modules are:
biojava3-core: The core module offers the basic tools required for working with biological sequences of various types (DNA, RNA, protein). Besides file parsers for popular file formats it provides efficient data structures for sequence manipulation and serialization.
biojava3-genome: The genome module provides support for reading and writing of gtf, gff2, gff3 file formats
biojava3-alignment: This module provides implementations for pairwise and multiple sequence alignments (MSA). The implementation for MSA provides a flexible and multi-threaded framework that works in linear space and that, as an option, allows the users to define anchors that are used in the build up of the multiple alignment.
biojava3-structure: The 3D protein structure module provides parsers and a data model for working PDB and mmCif files. New features in this release are the implementation of the CE and FATCAT structural alignment algorithms and the support of chemical component definition files, for a chemically and biologically correct representation of modified residues and ligands.
biojava3-protmod: The protein modification module can detect more than 200 protein modifications and crosslinks in 3D protein structures. It comes with an XML file and Java data structures to store information about different types of protein modifications collected from PDB, RESID, and PSI-MOD.
Not every feature of the BioJava 1.X code base was migrated over to BioJava 3.0. A modularized version of the 1.X sources is available as a new "biojava-legacy" project.
