can't apply styles to string from external source

Hi,

I've been reading up a bit on this but couldnt find a solution, so maybe someone here has some good advice.

I am running some data through BioRuby (which, among other things, calls an external program from the shell). This procedure returns a BioRuby object, similar to an array or hash. In my rails application, each element of this object can be puts'd and then, for example, gsub'ed, but the puts'd object will not accept any font-modifications, like font-size, font-style or whatever else via <span class='some-style'><%= bioruby_object.string %></span>. What could be the reason for this behavior?

Cheers,

Marc