Introduction to Python for Bioinformatics - available at https://github.com/kipkurui/Python4Bioinformatics2019.

hese notes have been greatly amended and updated for the MSC Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology at Pwani university, sponsored by EANBiT by Caleb Kibet

Throughout this course, we will be using Jupyter Notebooks. Although the HPC you will be using will have Jupyter setup, these notes are provided for you want to set it up in your Computer.

The Jupyter Notebook is an interactive computing environment that enables users to author notebooks, which contain a complete and self-contained record of a computation. These notebooks can be shared more efficiently. The notebooks may contain:

• Live code
• Interactive widgets
• Plots
• Narrative text
• Equations
• Images
• Video

It is good to note that "Jupyter" is a loose acronym meaning Julia, Python, and R; the primary languages supported by Jupyter.

The notebook can allow a computational researcher to create reproducible documentation of their research. As Bioinformatics is datacentric, use of Jupyter Notebooks increases research transparency, hence promoting open science.

1. Download Miniconda for your specific OS to your home directory
   • Linux: wget https://repo.continuum.io/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh
   • Mac: curl https://repo.continuum.io/miniconda/Miniconda3-latest-MacOSX-x86_64.sh
2. Run:
   • bash Miniconda3-latest-Linux-x86_64.sh
   • bash Miniconda3-latest-MacOSX-x86_64.sh
3. Follow all the prompts: if unsure, accept defaults
4. Close and re-open your terminal
5. If the installation is successful, you should see a list of installed packages with
   • conda list If the command cannot be found, you can add Anaconda bin to the path using: export PATH=~/miniconda3/bin:$PATH

For reproducible analysis, you can create a conda environment with all the Python packages you used.

`conda create --name bioinf python jupyter`

To activate the conda environment: source activate bioinf

Having set-up conda environment, you can install jupyter lab using pip.

conda install -c conda-forge jupyterlab

or by using pip

pip3 install jupyter

Download all the notebooks from [Python4Bioinformatics(https://github.com/kipkurui/Python4Bioinformatics2019). The easiest way to do that is to clone the GitHub repository to your working directory using any of the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/kipkurui/Python4Bioinformatics2019.git

or

wget https://github.com/kipkurui/Python4Bioinformatics2019/archive/master.zip

unzip master.zip

rm master.zip

cd Python4Bioinformatics-master

Then you can quickly launch jupyter lab using:

jupyter lab

NB: We will use a jupyter lab for training. A Jupyter notebook is made up of many cells. Each cell can contain Python code. You can execute a cell by clicking on it and pressing Shift-Enter or Ctrl-Enter (run without moving to the next line).

To learn more about Jupyter notebooks, check the official introduction and some useful Jupyter Tricks.

Book: http://www.ict.ru.ac.za/Resources/cspw/thinkcspy3/thinkcspy3.pdf

Python is a modern, robust, high-level programming language. It is straightforward to pick up even if you are entirely new to programming.

Python, similar to other languages like Matlab or R, is interpreted hence runs slowly compared to C++, Fortran or Java. However, writing programs in Python is very quick. Python has an extensive collection of libraries for everything from scientific computing to web services. It caters for object-oriented and functional programming with a module system that allows large and complex applications to be developed in Python.

These lectures are using Jupyter notebooks which mix Python code with documentation. The python notebooks can be run on a web server or stand-alone on a computer.

This course is broken up into a number of notebooks (lectures).

• 00 This introduction with additional information below on how to get started in running python
• 01 Basic data types and operations (numbers, strings)
• 02 String manipulation

• 03 Data structures: Lists and Tuples
• 04 Data structures (continued): dictionaries

• 05 Control statements: if, for, while, try statements
• 06 Functions
• 07 Scripting with python

• 08 Data Analysis and plotting with Pandas
• 09 Reproducible Bioinformatics Research
• 10 Reproducible Bioinformatics Research

This is a tutorial style introduction to Python. For a quick reminder/summary of Python syntax, the following Quick Reference Card may be useful. A longer and more detailed tutorial style introduction to python is available from the python site at: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/.

To contribute, fork the repository, make some updates and send me a pull request.

Alternatively, you can open an issue.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.