C Ramu1, C Gemünd, T J Gibson. 1. European Molecular Biological Laboratory, Meyerhofstrasse 1, Postfach 10.2209, Heidelberg, Germany. chenna@embl-heidelberg.de
Abstract
MOTIVATION: While database activities in the biological area are increasing rapidly, rather little is done in the area of parsing them in a simple and object-oriented way. RESULTS: We present here an elegant, simple yet powerful way of parsing biological flat-file databases. We have taken EMBL, SWISSPROT and GENBANK as examples. EMBL and SWISS-PROT do not differ much in the format structure. GENBANK has a very different format structure than EMBL and SWISS-PROT. Extracting the desired fields in an entry (for example a sub-sequence with an associated feature) for later analysis is a constant need in the biological sequence-analysis community: this is illustrated with tools to make new splice-site databases. The interface to the parser is abstract in the sense that the access to all the databases is independent from their different formats, since parsing instructions are hidden.
MOTIVATION: While database activities in the biological area are increasing rapidly, rather little is done in the area of parsing them in a simple and object-oriented way. RESULTS: We present here an elegant, simple yet powerful way of parsing biological flat-file databases. We have taken EMBL, SWISSPROT and GENBANK as examples. EMBL and SWISS-PROT do not differ much in the format structure. GENBANK has a very different format structure than EMBL and SWISS-PROT. Extracting the desired fields in an entry (for example a sub-sequence with an associated feature) for later analysis is a constant need in the biological sequence-analysis community: this is illustrated with tools to make new splice-site databases. The interface to the parser is abstract in the sense that the access to all the databases is independent from their different formats, since parsing instructions are hidden.