Parsing assignment
Due Friday, 2012 Oct 12

UCSC BME 205 Fall 2012
Bioinformatics: models and algorithms

(Last Update: 23:33 PDT 4 October 2012 )

Purpose

The purpose of this assignment is for you to build re-usable parsers for reading some of the most common sequence formats, so that you will have them available for future assignments.

Two concepts are important here: creating reusable modules and what the popular sequence formats are.

The program for this assignment should be built starting from the template created in the first assignment. Note that it need not be the template that you created for the first assignment, but if you start with someone else's template, they need to be credited in writing—their name should still be in the source code!

The formats: FASTA and FASTQ

The two most popular formats for sequences are FASTA (in many variants) and FASTQ (with two variants). You will need to do input and output of FASTA and FASTQ files for this assignment. As always with bioinformatics programs, you should be tolerant of minor variations in the format on input, but very strict on output.

There are four pieces of data associated with a sequence in a file:

  1. The name of the sequence, which usually is a string that contains neither spaces nor commas, but may have other special characters in it (NCBI loves using the "|" character in sequence names). For the purposes of this assignment, the name should be considered atomic, and not broken into smaller pieces.
  2. Extra information about the sequence. This is a string which may have any information in it, but is usually prohibited from having newlines. Again, some programs structure this extra information (in various incompatible ways), but for this assignment, it is an uninterpreted string.
  3. The sequence itself, consisting of either nucleotides or amino acids. Various wild cards are allowed, the special symbol "*" for stop codons and the special symbol "-" for gaps (which are interpreted differently in different programs).
  4. Sequence of quality information, generally integers that are rounded approximations to
    –10 log10 P(character is wrong)

FASTA format

FASTA format has ID lines starting with ">" in the first column and sequence lines. The ID extends from immediately after the ">" on the id line to the first white space or comma. The extra information is everything after the id and separator on the id line. Sequence lines contain the sequence, and are not allowed to contain ">" characters, but may have white space that is ignored.

Rather than giving you a precise definition of the FASTA format, I point you to the OK description on Wikipedia's FASTA format page. Go read it now. On that page, they say

Some databases and bioinformatics applications do not recognize these comments and follow the NCBI FASTA specification.

You should follow the NCBI FASTA specification for output of FASTA, since most programs don't understand the ';' comments. But one of NCBI's suggestions is both good and bad advice. They recommend

It is recommended that all lines of text be shorter than 80 characters in length.
Limiting lines in a file to a maximum length helps avoid problems with buffer overflow in programs where a fixed-length array is allocated to hold an input line. Unfortunately, it is not possible to keep all lines to below 80 characters. Since the extra information on the ID line may be arbitrarily long, and only one ID line is permitted per sequence, it is not possible to keep the ID line to 80 characters.

Some FASTA-derived formats, such as UCSC's A2M format extend the alphabet (adding "." in A2M), and some programs do not accept parts of the standard format (such as "*"). Your first FASTA parser should accept any FASTA file that follows the NCBI conventions, and should properly ignore white space within sequences. It should also ignore any extraneous characters (like the "." of A2M format). You can add options, if you want, to modify what alphabet is considered acceptable.

I have occasionally encountered a badly written program that can't handle having white space or newlines breaking up a sequence, in which case you need to put out the entire sequence on one line. There should probably be a command-line option in any program that outputs FASTA to choose between line-length limitations and sequence-on-a-single-line.

Note that the FASTA format provides name, extra data, and sequence information, but does not provide quality information. When quality information is needed with FASTA files, two files are used. One is the straight FASTA file with names, extra data, and sequences, and the other is a file with ">" lines having the same ids in the same order, but having white-space-separated integers instead of bases or amino acids. Note that the number of integers is expected to be identical to the number of bases or amino acids for the corresponding sequence in the sequence file.

FASTQ format

The Wikipedia article on FASTQ format is a pretty good description of the format.

Some important points to note:

The task

Create three generators in a module that you can include from other Python programs: