Bio-babel

_{An AI-assisted community stewarding the classics of bioinformatics — in more than one tongue.}

"And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech." — Genesis 11:1

Scientific software gets locked in the language it was written in. A bridge like rpy2 lets an agent call an R tool; it does not let anyone extend or build on it natively — and the classics go unmaintained as their language and dependencies move on.

Bio-Babel rebuilds them natively in the target ecosystem, and ships each package with a machine-readable contract so an agent that has never seen it still calls it correctly. Nothing in that is specific to R, or to graphics. R → Python is where we are proving it: seventeen classics so far, each its own repository and its own caretaker.

bio-babel.github.io  →
_{The catalog, the architecture, and how the contracts work.}

• Tell us what is missing, or what is wrong. Name a classic you wish existed on the other side, and the workflow that is painful without it. Better still, report a port behaving differently from its reference — that one belongs on the port's own repository. Divergence is a bug, and it is the most useful thing you can send us.
• Bring one over. Tell us which classic you would like to help carry across and we will help you scope it — or simply start, in public.
• Adopt a package. The scarcest resource here is not code, it is long-term maintainers. If a library matters to your work, consider becoming its caretaker.

Open an issue →

🚧 Every library in the catalog is under testing — APIs stabilizing, edges still being filed. Use it for verifiable work, and tell us when it is wrong.

🔒 The porting pipeline — bio-babel-toolkit and bio-babel-annotator — is still in internal development and not yet public. It will be. The contract layer it feeds, bio-babel-MCP, already is.

_{The classics, kept alive in more than one tongue.}