[Bioperl-l] Re: [Bioperl-guts-l] RestrictionEnzyme.pm (Hilmar Lapp)

[Marc Colosimo]

> Paul-Christophe Varoutas wrote:
> >
> > Hi again,
> >
> > Yesterday night I started experimenting with RestrictionEnzyme.pm.
> >
> > I liked very much the '-MAKE' =>'custom' switch in the constructor but I
> > think it would nevertheless be a good idea to  write a public method which
> > updates the enzyme list from the NEBASE site.
> >
> > I suggest to write a sub (lets call it update_list or update_RE_list) that:
> >
> > - goes to the NEBASE site and gets the last version of the restriction
> > enzyme list. We can choose between http/ftp and various types of
> > lists/formats. My preference would be to go to their ftp site and get what
> > they call "format 18": DNAStrider format, list of all commercially
> > available enzymes. The file is ftp://ftp.nebase.com/pub/nebase/striderc.*,
> > the extension of the file reflects the version).
> > - saves this list in a text file, in the Bio/Tools/ directory. An
> > alternative is to update the enzyme list in the RestrictionEnzyme.pm file
> > itself, at the beginning of the file, within the definition of the %RE
> > hash, but intuitively I would not tend to recommend it, as I don't know if
> > writting in a file at the same time it is being read by the perl
> > interpreter will behave well in all operating systems. Tell me what you
> > think about it.
>
> You normally can't write to Bio/Tools as a user (under Unix), and
> a user client shouldn't attempt to do so under any circumstances.
> Regarding the ability to update the list of known REs, I see the
> following options.

> 1) Accept an additional (named!) parameter at initialization that

> denotes a file (in DNAStrider format?) containing the enzymes to
> be known in addition to a collection of hard-coded enzymes.
> 2) Same as before, but the parameter denotes a URL from where to
> obtain this file.
> 3) Put all hard-coded enzymes into a file that resides at a known
> place within the Bio/ directory tree, and read (parse) that upon
> initialization of RestrictionEnzyme.pm. An update would mean
> updating that file.

I would like to out that not all systems are as mean as Unix. Also, it would be nice
to read them in save them in the local space. That way the user can just tell it to
use the one in his/her space. That way they can have different ones (for what every
reason).

If your going through the trouble of doing this. Could you also add the ability to
use multiple enzymes and/or list multiple enzymes?

>
>
> I'm not sure option 3) would have compelling advantages to the
> present layout. Options 1) and 2) are certainly worthwhile to
> pursue and in essence are almost identical, the only difference
> being how to open the stream containing the enzyme data. So, one
> could try to combine both into one parameter, and have the code
> figure out whether it's a file or a http/ftp URL.
>
>         Hilmar

Marc