[Bioperl-l] default Bio::DB::SwissProt server broken?

[Matthew Conte]

Hello,

I have a custom script for parsing out UniProt accessions from a GFF3 file
and fetching the description of the UniProt entry using Bio::DB::SwissProt
and *get_Seq_by_acc*.  This script has been working for months without any
problems until now.  The script and the format of the input files has not
changed at all.

I now get an error like this:

*------------- EXCEPTION: Bio::Root::Exception -------------*
*MSG: acc O95342 does not exist*
*STACK: Error::throw*
*STACK: Bio::Root::Root::throw /Library/Perl/5.10.0/Bio/Root/Root.pm:368*
*STACK: Bio::DB::WebDBSeqI::get_Seq_by_acc
/Library/Perl/5.10.0/Bio/DB/WebDBSeqI.pm:195*
*STACK: /Users/Matt/scripts/get_uniprot_names.pl:35*
*-----------------------------------------------------------*

The relevant portion of my original code looks something like this:

*#!/usr/bin/perl*
*use strict;*
*use Bio::DB::SwissProt;*
*#parse out accession number*
*..*
*my $acc_num = "**O95342";*
*my $db_obj = Bio::DB::SwissProt->new;*
*my $seq_obj = $db_obj->get_Seq_by_acc($acc_num);*
*
*
Looking at the documentation for Bio::DB::SwissProt, I noticed you can
specify -servertype and -hostlocation.  So I changed my code to look
something like this:

*
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use Bio::DB::SwissProt;
#parse out accession number
..
my $acc_num = "O95342";
my $db_obj = Bio::DB::SwissProt->new('-servertype' => 'expasy',
                                                           '-hostlocation'
=> 'us');
my $seq_obj = $db_obj->get_Seq_by_acc($acc_num);
*

This fixes my problem and my script works again.

The default *hostlocation *is http://www.ebi.ac.uk/cgi-bin/dbfetch and the
'us' *hostlocation *is http://us.expasy.org/cgi-bin/sprot-retrieve-list.pl.
  Both of these urls work in a browser, though the default throws the error
in my script. Interestingly, the 'us' url has a notice that says
"*Notice:* This
page will be replaced with www.uniprot.org. Please send us your
feedback<http://www.uniprot.org/contact>
!", so hopefully it doesn't break soon as well.  Perhaps the default ebi url
was recently changed in some way?  Anyway, I figured I'd post here in case
anyone else ran into this problem.

cheers,
Matt