Book Image

Bioinformatics with Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Tiago Antao
Book Image

Bioinformatics with Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Tiago Antao

Overview of this book

Bioinformatics is an active research field that uses a range of simple-to-advanced computations to extract valuable information from biological data. This book covers next-generation sequencing, genomics, metagenomics, population genetics, phylogenetics, and proteomics. You'll learn modern programming techniques to analyze large amounts of biological data. With the help of real-world examples, you'll convert, analyze, and visualize datasets using various Python tools and libraries. This book will help you get a better understanding of working with a Galaxy server, which is the most widely used bioinformatics web-based pipeline system. This updated edition also includes advanced next-generation sequencing filtering techniques. You'll also explore topics such as SNP discovery using statistical approaches under high-performance computing frameworks such as Dask and Spark. By the end of this book, you'll be able to use and implement modern programming techniques and frameworks to deal with the ever-increasing deluge of bioinformatics data.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Index

Accessing the Global Biodiversity Information Facility via REST


The GBIF (http://www.gbif.org) gives the available information about biodiversity in a programmatic friendly way using a REST API.

In GBIF, we will find evidence of the occurrence of species across the planet, and much of this information is geo-referenced.

In this recipe, we will concentrate on two types of GBIF information: species and occurrences.

Species are actually a more general taxonomic framework, and occurrences record the observations of species.

In this recipe, we will try to extract biodiversity information related to bears. You can find this content in the Chapter10/GBIF.ipynb Notebook.

How to do it...

Let's take a look at the following steps:

  1. First, let's define a function to get the data on REST, as shown in the following code:
import requests

def do_request(service, a1=None, a2=None, a3=None, **kwargs):
    server = 'http://api.gbif.org/v1'
    params = ''
    for a in [a1, a2, a3]:
        if a is not None:
     ...