bioservices 1.1.2

Access to Biological Web Services from Python

Bioservices is a Python package that provides access to many Bioinformatices Web Services (e.g., UniProt) and a framework to easily implement Web Services wrappers (based on WSDL/SOAP or REST protocols).

The primary goal of BioServices is to use Python as a glue language to provide a programmatic access to several Bioinformatics Web Services. By doing so, elaboration of new applications that combine several of the wrapped Web Services should be fostered.

One of the main philosophy of BioServices is to make use of the existing biological databases (not to re-invent new databases) and to alleviates the needs for expertise in Web Services for the developers/users.

So far, BioServices provides wrappers for 18 Web Services including

• BioModels

• KEGG

• UniProt

• quickGO

• PSICQUIC

• WikiPathway

• and more (e.g., UniChem, ChEMBL, EUtils, …). Up-to-date list of Web Services is provided within the documentation.

Here is just a little example using the UniProt Web Service to search for the zap70 specy in human organism:

>>> from bioservices import UniProt
>>> u = UniProt(verbose=False)
>>> data = u.search("zap70+and+taxonomy:9606", format="tab", limit=3, columns="entry name,length,id, genes")
>>> print(data)
Entry name   Length  Entry   Gene names
ZAP70_HUMAN  619     P43403  ZAP70 SRK
B4E0E2_HUMAN 185     B4E0E2
RHOH_HUMAN   191     Q15669  RHOH ARHH TTF

More examples and tutorials are available in the exhaustive On-line documentation