Degenerated Codons

Latest revision as of 17:22, 5 March 2012

Problem

Sometimes statistics on nucleotide sequences are limited to X-fold degenerated codons. The following code provides some functions to solve this problem, by generating a subsequence.

Solution

from Bio.Data.CodonTable import unambiguous_dna_by_id
 
def altcodons( codon, table ):
    """
    list codons that code for the same aminoacid / are also stop
    @param codon
    @table code table id
    @return list of codons
    """
 
    tab = unambiguous_dna_by_id[ table ]
 
    if codon in tab.stop_codons:
        return tab.stop_codons
 
    try:
        aa = tab.forward_table[codon]
    except:
        return []
 
    return [k for ( k, v ) in tab.forward_table.iteritems() if v == aa and k[0] == codon[0] and k[1] == codon[1]]
 
def degeneration( codon, table ):
    """
    determine how many codons code for the same amino acid / are also stop
    as codon
 
    @param codon the codon
    @param table code table id 
    @param the number of codons also coding for the aminoacid codon codes for
    """
 
    return len( altcodons( codon, table ) )
 
def isXdegenerated( x, codon, table ):
    """
    determine if codon is x-fold degenerated
 
    @param codon the codon
    @param table code table id  
    @param true if x <= the degeneration of the codon
    """
 
    return ( x <= len( altcodons( codon, table ) ) )
 
def degenerated_subseq( seq, x, table ):
    """
    get a subsequence consisting of the x-fold degenerated codons only
    """
 
    data = ""
    for i in range( 0, len( seq ), 3 ):
        codon = seq[i:i + 3].tostring()
        if isXdegenerated( x, codon, table ):
            data += codon
    return data