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 GenBank and moving around NCBI databases


Although you may have your own data to analyze, you will probably need existing genomic datasets. Here, we will look at how to access such databases at the National Center forBiotechnology Information (NCBI). We will not only discuss GenBank, but also other databases at NCBI. Many people refer (wrongly) to the whole set of NCBI databases as GenBank, but NCBI includes the nucleotide database and many others, for example, PubMed.

As sequencing analysis is a long subject, and this book targets intermediate to advanced users, we will not be very exhaustive with a topic that is, at its core, not very complicated. Nonetheless, it's a good warm-up for the more complex recipes that we will see at the end of this chapter.

Getting ready

We will use Biopython, which you installed in Chapter 1, Python and the Surrounding Software Ecology. Biopython provides an interface to Entrez, the data retrieval system made available by NCBI. This recipe is made available...