The NESCent Phyloinformatics group is a partnership of the NESCent Informatics program with developers from a number of widely popular open-source life-science programming toolkits (BioPerl, Biojava, Biopython, Bioruby, BioSQL; collectively referred to as the Bio projects, see http://www.open-bio.org) and software tools for phylogenetic analysis. This resulted in the first ever Phyloinformatics Hackathon (http://phyloinformatics.net/Phylohackathon_1) held in Durham, NC, in December 2006. The objective of the group is to further seamless interoperability and the consistent support of data exchange standards in all areas of evolutionary bioinformatics.

The National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), is an NSF-funded center located in Durham, NC. Its overall mission is to facilitate synthetic research aimed at addressing fundamental questions in evolution. Synthetic research uses existing primary data from previously published studies and other sources to combine them in new and intelligent ways to address questions of broad significance.

At the core of the mission of the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), the umbrella organization for the Bio projects is the promotion of open-source software development in the field of bioinformatics.