Bioinformatics Programming
How to execute Unix/shell commands in PHP?
Besides, Python & Perl, PHP is another language mostly used in bioinformatics programming. In this article, we provide a simple command to execute shell commands in a PHP script.
shell_exec()
It runs command via shell and returns the output as a string.
syntax: $output = shell_exec($command);
If you are using variables inside your command, you need to use escapeshellarg().
syntax: $output = shell_exec($command);
Let’s assume, if you are running the blastp command on a query file with a variable filename, then it could be run like this:
$output = shell_exec("blastp -query ".escapeshellarg($filename.'.fasta')." -db /path/to/db -out output.txt");
With the new year, we are going to start with a very simple yet complicated topic (for beginners) in bioinformatics. In this tutorial, we provide a simple code to plot swarm boxplot using matplotlib and seaborn. (more…)
Previously, we provided a similar script to download ligand SMILES from PDB ligand IDs. In this article, we are downloading PDB ligand structures from their corresponding IDs. (more…)
Fetching SMILE strings for a given number of SDF files of chemical compounds is not such a trivial task. We can quickly obtain them using RDKit or OpenBabel. But what if you don’t have SDF files of ligands in the first place? All you have is Ligand IDs from PDB. If they are a few then you can think of downloading SDF files manually but still, it seems time-consuming, especially when you have multiple compounds to work with. Therefore, we provide a Python script that will read all Ligand IDs and fetch their SDF files, and will finally convert them into SMILE strings. (more…)
You must be logged in to post a comment Login