[Bioperl-l] SearchIO-BLAST

[Chris Fields]

I can confirm this (I'm using bioperl-live).  The output I get is:

Num of hits: 9
ref|NM_000039.1|
ref|NT_113960.1|Hs22_111679
ref|NT_033899.7|Hs11_34054
ref|NW_925173.1|HsCraAADB02_444
ref|NM_000039.1|
ref|NT_113960.1|Hs22_111679
ref|NT_033899.7|Hs11_34054
ref|NW_925173.1|HsCraAADB02_444
ref|NW_925173.1|HsCraAADB02_444

The extra '>' is definitely throwing the event calls for a loop; the  
2x increase is b/c an extra iteration is started when '>' is  
encountered (changing the event handler reduces the number to 5).   
The extra hit is from the '>' at the beginning.

I hate to say it, but this is an instance where we can't be more  
flexible, primarily b/c '>' is a legit token the parser looks for (it  
is the beginning of the hit block in reports).  Finding it as the  
initial token in the report is also legitimate for some older BLAST  
output, so we also can't simply bypass it.  You'll unfortunately have  
to preparse the reports to get rid of those lines prior to feeding  
them to the BLAST text report parser.

chris

On Aug 21, 2007, at 11:32 AM, Bernd Web wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Recently, I stumbled on something with parsing BLAST reports.  To a
> plain text blast report from NCBI a ">aaa" got prepended. This
> (fasta-like header) changes the $result->hits array.
> The amount of hits is now 2*num_hits + 1. Clearly, this is related to
> faulty input, but still the effect of this line is great. Does someone
> see what is causing this, and should the BLAST parser maybe be
> slightly more relaxed wrt pre/appended text? I have not seen yet why
> this extra fastaheader line has such a "large" effect.
>
> A short example BLASTN output is attached.
> Example code is:
>
> use Bio::SearchIO;
> my $in = new Bio::SearchIO(-format => 'blast',
>                            -file   => 'apoe_plain.bls');
> while( my $result = $in->next_result ) {
>   print "Num of hits: ", $result->num_hits, "\n";
>   my @hits = $result->hits;
>   foreach my $el (@hits) {
>   	print $el->name, "\n";
>   }
>
>
> Kind regards,
> Bernd
> <apoe_plain.bls>
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Christopher Fields
Postdoctoral Researcher
Lab of Dr. Robert Switzer
Dept of Biochemistry
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign