[Biopython] Is this a valid genbank record?

[Fields, Christopher J]

On Jan 18, 2012, at 8:50 AM, Peter Cock wrote:

> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 11:11 AM, Michael Thon <mike.thon at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Jan 18, 2012, at 12:03 PM, Peter Cock wrote:
>> 
>>> On Wed, Jan 18, 2012 at 10:14 AM, Michael Thon <mike.thon at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>  They have weird feature locations:
>>>> 
>>>>     Het             join(bond(127),bond(127),bond(130),bond(130),bond(138),
>>>>                     bond(138),bond(139),bond(138))
>>>> 
> 
> Do you actually need to do anything with this feature? If not, then
> the pragmatic solution is we issue a warning but otherwise ignore
> the feature and continue parsing. I'm struggling to grok exactly
> what this location is trying to convey - maybe I should read the
> associated paper?

GenPept is littered with these.  With bioperl we only attempt to support 'bond' types for round-tripping, but I don't recall whether this has been extensively tested, though it would be easy enough to add this in to see if the location factory will handle this properly (both to and from a location string).

Do wish NCBI would document this more...

chris