rna

[If you are more familiar with biology than with Python or computer programming, I highly recommend this book .]

Some simple, hopefully useful, and totally non-optimized functions for working with nucleotide sequence data (note that there are many more tools as part of the biopython distribution, if you’re interested in learning the library) :

First, for cleaning up a sequence (preferably in FASTA format):

def clean_sequence( sequence ):
    """Given a sequence string, return a crap-free, standardized DNA version."""
    s = sequence.replace( '\r', '' ).split( '\n' )  # separate each line
    if s[0][0] == '&gt;': s = s[ 1 :]                  # remove defline
    s = ''.join( s )                                # make one long string
    s = s.replace( ' ', '' ).replace( '\t', '' )    # remove spaces
    return s.upper().replace( 'U', 'T' )

Then, a function to let you know if there are characters in your sequence that shouldn’t be:

def report_bad_chars( sequence ):
    """Given a string 'sequence', return a dictionary of any non-AGCT characters."""
    bad_chars = {}
    for l in sequence:
        if l not in 'AGCT':
            if l in bad_chars: bad_chars[ l ] += 1
            else: bad_chars[ l ] = 1
    if bad_chars != {}: print( bad_chars )

After the jump, functions for translation, calculating amino acid and nucleotide frequencies, and making random DNA sequences.

Continue reading →

A Public History of Wrongness

Thoughts and Ramblings by Adam Coster

Python: Clean up and translate nucleotide sequences

tRNA pun