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

Introduction


In this chapter, we will discuss high-performance computing techniques for large computational biology datasets. We will talk about efficient data storage, code parallelization, running software in clusters, and code optimization. We will try to avoid any solution to a specific proprietary technology (for example, Amazon EC2) and will instead design code that will be applicable in a wide range of scenarios.

The previous edition of this book had some recipes that compared lazy and eager data structures. This made sense, as Python 2 was mostly eager and Python 3 is mostly lazy. As Python 2 is behind us, that content has been dropped. That being said, make sure that you understand the difference and that your code is mostly lazy. Be sure to check generators in Python. Use them.

As the sizes of the datasets is constantly increasing, in this edition, we cannot evade discussing the efficient storage of bioinformatics data, and so we will discuss the Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5) and...