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

[Hamish McWilliam]

Hi Chris,

The dbfetch service at EBI has changed, see
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/webservices/about/news#st_october_2010. On
of the effects of this is the main endpoint used for dbfetch has
changed from http://www.ebi.ac.uk/cgi-bin/dbfetch to
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/dbfetch/dbfetch. With the old endpoints
being supported via a HTTP redirect. It looks like the
Bio::DB::SwissProt module does not support redirects and is thus
getting an empty document back from the service. Looks like the URL
used in the code needs to be updated.

All the best,

Hamish

On 26 October 2010 23:02, Chris Fields <cjfields at illinois.edu> wrote:
> The default was changed recently in github to 'expasy'.  My guess is something changed on the EBI DBFetch end that isn't accepting certain identifiers anymore.
>
> chris
>
> On Oct 26, 2010, at 1:25 PM, Matthew Conte wrote:
>
>> 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
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>
>
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