At JuliaCon 2015, Daniel Jones presented BioJulia: A modern Bioinformatics framework. In the years following, as julia has developed, so has BioJulia grown in the number of packages, and the number of contributors. At the same time, sequencing technology has moved at a rapid pace, resulting more data, and in new techniques for assembling and analysing genomes. As a result biologists and bioinformaticians face both conceptual, scientific, and engineering questions: What is the canonical representation of a genome? What is the best way to analyse genomic data to address my hypothesis? How can these analyses be made reliable and repeatable? How do we do it quickly and efficiently, and on commonly available hardware? In this talk I will present how BioJulia has developed since 2015 and how we have addressed some of the challenges current Bioinformatics practices have presented us with. I will also talk about some of the directions Bioinformatics research (in particular genome assembly and multi-genome analyses) is heading, and where I think BioJulia development will be heading in anticipation of this comming “pan-genomics era”.
