[BioPython] GenBank parser added to CVS

Brad Chapman chapmanb@arches.uga.edu
Sat, 20 Jan 2001 16:50:54 -0500 (EST)


Hello all!
As you probably know if you follow the development list, I've been
working on a GenBank parser. Thanks to lots of helpful feedback and
code contributions from Andrew, Cayte, Jeff and others on the list, I
think it's finally ready for general consumption, so I just committed
it to CVS. Additionally, I've also commited code to handle both
SeqFeatures and fuzzy Locations to help support this GenBank parser.

I'd really be appreciative if people who have interest in this would
check it out and give me comments/let me know about
problems. Documentation on both the GenBank parser and the SeqFeature
stuff can be found at the usual place:

http://biopython.org/wiki/html/BioPython/BiopythonCode.html

The GenBank parser does require Martel, so please make sure you have
this installed.

Here are the highlights on the code:

GenBank Parser
--------------
o Should be able to parse almost any current GenBank stuff out
there. Please let me know about files you can find that fail.

o Can parse GenBank into a GenBank specific record class and a general 
SeqRecord/SeqFeature class.

o Has functionality for creating an Iterator and Dictionary from a
GenBank file.

o Thanks to Jeff, there is code for interacting with NCBI and fetching 
GenBank records directly from the site.

SeqFeature/Location classes
---------------------------
o General structure which seems to handle GenBank files appropriately. I'm
going to try to work on migrating the other Sequence Parsers over to
this so that we can finally deprecate Sequence.py, and can make sure
the class is general enough for all of our uses.

o Parses GenBank location lines completely, including full support for 
fuzzy locations. Many thanks to Andrew for a great SPARK-based parser
that does all the hard work.

o Compatible with the BioCorba interfaces, so we will now be able to
create python BioCorba servers.

Hope everyone enjoys it! Thanks again to everyone to their help with
this so far.

Brad