SeqIO - Hints for Developers

This page is aimed at any developers or coders interesting in understanding or extending the new Sequence Input/Output interface for Biopython, SeqIO.

Reading new file formats

Note: The details are still subject to change

To add support for reading a new file format, you must implement an iterator that expects a just file handle and returns SeqRecord objects. You may do this using:

• An iterator class subclassing something from Bio.SeqIO.Interfaces
• A generator function (using the yield keyword; suitable for simple formats)
• An ordinary function which returns an iterator. For example, you could build a list of SeqRecords and then turn it into an iterator using the iter() function.

You may accept additional optional arguments. However there must be one and only one required argument (the input file handle).

What you use as the SeqRecord’s id, name and description will depend on the file format. Ideally you would use the accesion number for the id. This id should also be unique for each record (unless the records in the file are in themselves ambiguous).

When storing any annotations in the record’s annotations dictionary follow the defacto standard laid down by the GenBank parser… I should try and document this more.

If the supplied file seems to be invalid, raise a ValueError exception.

Finally, the new format must be added to the relevant dictionary mapping in Bio/SeqIO/__init__.py so that the Bio.SeqIO.parse() and Bio.SeqIO.read() functions are aware of it.

Writing new file formats

Note: The details are still subject to change

To add support for writing a new file format you should write a sub class of one of the writer objects in Bio.SeqIO.Interfaces.

Then, the new format must be added to the relevant dictionary mappings in Bio/SeqIO/__init__.py so that the Bio.SeqIO.write() function is aware of your code.

If the supplied records cannot be written to this file format, raise a ValueError exception. Where appropriate, please use the following wording:

raise ValueError("Must have at least one sequence")
raise ValueError("Sequences must all be the same length")
raise ValueError("Duplicate record identifier: %s" % ...)
...

ToDo - Defined standard exceptions in Bio.SeqIO itself?

Possible additional formats

There are existing parsers in Biopython for the following file formats, which could be integrated into SeqIO, AlignIO or SearchIO if appropriate.

KEGG format

Can Bio.KEGG parse files in KEGG format?

MEME format

Bio.MEME has a parser for this file format, which at first glance looks like it could be treated like an alignment format.

http://meme-suite.org/

BLAST results

Pairwise alignments from the BLAST suite could be turned into a pairwise Alignment object with Bio.AlignIO. Is this useful? Sample code on Bug 2560