“Bioconductor Notes, September 2026” published in The R Journal.
Bioconductor provides tools for the analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genomic data. The project has entered its twenty-sixth year, with funding for core development and infrastructure maintenance continuing through current NIH NHGRI support (NIH NHGRI 2U24HG004059). Additional support is provided by NIH NCI, Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, National Science Foundation, Microsoft, and Amazon. In this news report, we highlight recent core team and project activities.
The current Bioconductor release remains version 3.23. Development is ongoing towards the next Bioconductor release, scheduled for October 2026.
The Bioconductor Community Team continues to expand developer and community engagement activities.
The monthly Developer Forum continues to bring together package developers and community members to discuss technical topics, share expertise, and identify opportunities for collaboration across the Bioconductor ecosystem. Recent sessions have included Aaron Lun discussing the future of the Orchestrating Single-Cell Analysis (OSCA) books and Sebastian Fischer introducing the {anvl} package. Upcoming sessions will address topics including R package dependency management, performance optimisation, and integration of R and Nextflow workflows.
Developer engagement activities also continued through community hackathons. Following BioC2026 in Seattle, a two-day post-conference hackathon brought together developers and contributors to collaborate on package development, documentation, infrastructure, and community projects.
The Bioconductor Africa seminar series, led by Laurah Nyasita Ondari, continues to provide regular online seminars for researchers across Africa. Recent sessions have covered genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and multi-omics analysis, while upcoming seminars focus on single-cell data analysis. Recordings and registration are available through the Bioconductor Training website.
Laurah Nyasita Ondari has also presented recent Bioconductor community-building activities in Africa at international Research Software Engineering events, including RSAfrica26 and RSECon26.
The BiocAsia working group continues preparations for BioCAsia 2026 while developing regional engagement activities. Details of upcoming seminars and community events are available through the Bioconductor events calendar.
BioC2026: The North American Bioconductor Conference was held in August 2026 in Seattle, USA. The conference brought together researchers, package developers, educators, and infrastructure contributors from across the Bioconductor community. In addition to scientific presentations and workshops, the event included a post-conference hackathon focused on collaborative software development, technical infrastructure, training materials, and community initiatives. Recordings of talks are available on the Bioconductor YouTube channel.
BioFAIR 2026 Sprint: During 15-17 September 2026, Bioconductor contributors participated in the BioFAIR Workflow Interoperability Sprint in Milton Keynes, UK, alongside collaborators from the Galaxy and Nextflow communities. The sprint focused on identifying opportunities for collaboration, improving interoperability between tools and workflows, and developing plans for future joint activities across the open-source bioinformatics ecosystem.
The annual call for new members of the Technical Advisory Board (TAB) and Community Advisory Board (CAB) closed on 31 August 2026. New members will be selected and onboarded over the coming months.
Start using Bioconductor by installing the most recent version of R and evaluating the commands
if (!requireNamespace("BiocManager", quietly = TRUE))
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BiocManager::install()Install additional packages and dependencies, e.g., SingleCellExperiment, with
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Upcoming and recently completed events are browsable at our events page.
The Technical and Community Advisory Boards provide guidance to ensure that the project addresses leading-edge biological problems with advanced technical approaches, and adopts practices (such as a project-wide Code of Conduct) that encourages all to participate. We look forward to welcoming you!
We welcome your feedback on these updates and invite you to connect with us through the Bioconductor Zulip workspace or by emailing community@bioconductor.org.
Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".
For attribution, please cite this work as
Doyle & Team, "The R Journal: Bioconductor Notes, September 2026", The R Journal, 2026
BibTeX citation
@article{RJ-2026-3-bioconductor,
author = {Doyle, Maria and Team, Bioconductor Core Developer},
title = {The R Journal: Bioconductor Notes, September 2026},
journal = {The R Journal},
year = {2026},
note = {https://journal.r-project.org/news/RJ-2026-3-bioconductor},
volume = {18},
issue = {3},
issn = {2073-4859},
pages = {1}
}