Source of the materials: Biopython Tutorial and Cookbook (adapted)
The Biopython Project is an international association of developers of freely available Python (http://www.python.org) tools for computational molecular biology. Python is an object oriented, interpreted, flexible language that is becoming increasingly popular for scientific computing. Python is easy to learn, has a very clear syntax and can easily be extended with modules written in C, C++ or FORTRAN.
The Biopython web site (http://www.biopython.org) provides an online resource for modules, scripts, and web links for developers of Python-based software for bioinformatics use and research. Basically, the goal of Biopython is to make it as easy as possible to use Python for bioinformatics by creating high-quality, reusable modules and classes. Biopython features include parsers for various Bioinformatics file formats (BLAST, Clustalw, FASTA, Genbank,...), access to online services (NCBI, Expasy,...), interfaces to common and not-so-common programs (Clustalw, DSSP, MSMS...), a standard sequence class, various clustering modules, a KD tree data structure etc. and even documentation.
Basically, we just like to program in Python and want to make it as easy as possible to use Python for bioinformatics by creating high-quality, reusable modules and scripts.
The main Biopython releases have lots of functionality, including:
We hope this gives you plenty of reasons to download and start using Biopython!
These notebooks were prepared on Python 3 for Project Jupyter 4+ (formely IPython Notebook). Biopython should be installed and available (v1.66 or newer recommended).
You can check the basic installation and inspect the version by doing:
In [1]:
import Bio
print(Bio.__version__)
In [ ]: