BIOPERL

TUTORIAL (ABREV.)

Getting started in Bio::Perl

1) Simple script to get a sequence by Id and write to specified format

use Bio::Perl;
# this script will only work if you have an internet connection on the
# computer you're using, the databases you can get sequences from
# are 'swiss', 'genbank', 'genpept', 'embl', and 'refseq'
$seq_object = get_sequence('genbank',"ROA1_HUMAN");
write_sequence(">roa1.fasta",'fasta',$seq_object);

That second argument of write_sequence, 'fasta', is the sequence format. You
can choose among all the formats supported by SeqIO. Try writing the sequence file
in 'genbank' format.
2) Another example is the ability to blast a sequence using the facilities as NCBI. Please
be careful not to abuse the resources that NCBI provides and use this only for
individual searches. If you want to do a large number of BLAST searches, please
download the blast package and install it locally.
use Bio::Perl;
$seq = get_sequence('genbank',"ROA1_HUMAN");
# uses the default database - nr in this case
$blast_result = blast_sequence($seq);
write_blast(">roa1.blast",$blast_result);

Bio::Perl has a limited number of functions to retrieve and manipulate sequence

data. (Bio::Perl manpage)

Sequence objects

(Seq, PrimarySeq, RichSeq, LargeSeq, LocatableSeq, RelSegment, LiveSeq,

SeqWithQuality, SeqI)
This section describes various Bioperl sequence objects. Typically you dont need to
know the type of Sequence object because SeqIO assesses and creates the right type
of object when given a file, filehandle or string.

Seq

The central sequence object in bioperl. When in doubt this is probably the object
that you want to use to describe a DNA, RNA or protein sequence in bioperl. Most
common sequence manipulations can be performed with Seq. (Bio::Seq manpage).
Seq objects may be created for you automatically when you read in a file containing
sequence data using the SeqIO object (see below). In addition to storing its
identification labels and the sequence itself, a Seq object can store multiple
annotations and associated ``sequence features'', such as those contained in most
Genbank and EMBL sequence files. This capability can be very useful - especially in
development of automated genome annotation systems.

PrimarySeq

A stripped-down version of Seq. It contains just the sequence data itself and a few
identifying labels (id, accession number, alphabet = dna, rna, or protein), and no
features. For applications with hundreds or thousands or sequences, using
PrimarySeq objects can significantly speed up program execution and decrease the
amount of RAM the program requires. (Bio::PrimarySeq manpage).

RichSeq

Stores additional annotations beyond those used by standard Seq objects. If you are
using sources with very rich sequence annotation, you may want to consider using
these objects. RichSeq objects are created automatically when Genbank, EMBL, or
Swissprot format files are read by SeqIO. (Bio::Seq::RichSeqI manpage)

LargeSeq

Used for handling very long sequences (e.g. > 100 MB). (Bio::Seq::LargeSeq
manpage).

LocatableSeq

Might be more appropriately called an ``AlignedSeq'' object. It is a Seq object which

is part of a multiple sequence alignment. It has start and end positions indicating
from where in a larger sequence it may have been extracted. It also may have gap
symbols corresponding to the alignment to which it belongs. It is used by the
alignment object SimpleAlign and other modules that use SimpleAlign objects (e.g.
AlignIO.pm, pSW.pm).
LocatableSeq objects will be made for you automatically when you create an
alignment (using pSW, Clustalw, Tcoffee, Lagan, or bl2seq) or when you input an
alignment data file using AlignIO. However if you need to input a sequence
alignment by hand (e.g. to build a SimpleAlign object), you will need to input the

sequences as LocatableSeqs. Other sources of information include the

Bio::LocatableSeq manpage, the Bio::SimpleAlign manpage, the Bio::AlignIO
manpage, and the Bio::Tools::pSW manpage.

SeqWithQuality

Used to manipulate sequences with quality data, like those produced by phred., , and
in (Bio::Seq::SeqWithQuality manpage).

RelSegment

Useful when you want to be able to manipulate the origin of the genomic coordinate
system. This situation may occur when looking at a sub-sequence (e.g. an exon)
which is located on a longer underlying underlying sequence such as a chromosome
or a contig. Such manipulations may be important, for example when designing a
graphical genome browser. If your code may need such a capability, look at the
documentation the Bio::DB::GFF::RelSegment manpage which describes this feature
in detail.

LiveSeq

Addresses the problem of features whose location on a sequence changes over time.
This can happen, for example, when sequence feature objects are used to store gene
locations on newly sequenced genomes - locations which can change as higher
quality sequencing data becomes available. Although a LiveSeq object is not
implemented in the same way as a Seq object, LiveSeq does implement the SeqI
interface (see below). Consequently, most methods available for Seq objects will
work fine with LiveSeq objects. Section III.7.4 and the Bio::LiveSeq manpage contain
further discussion of LiveSeq objects.

SeqI

Seq ``interface objects''. They are used to ensure bioperl's compatibility with other
software packages. SeqI and other interface objects are not likely to be relevant to
the casual Bioperl user. (Bio::SeqI manpage)

Accessing sequence data from local and remote databases

Example: create a simple Seq object. Can you make it print the accession number,
alphabet, and sequence each on a separate line
$seq = Bio::Seq->new(-seq
-description
-display_id
-accession_number
-alphabet

=>
=>
=>
=>
=>

'actgtggcgtcaact',
'Sample Bio::Seq object',
'something',
'BIOL_5310',
'dna' );

In most cases, you will probably be accessing sequence data from some online data
file or database.

Accessing remote databases

Example: The following code example will get 3 different sequences from GenBank.

$gb = new Bio::DB::GenBank();

# this returns a Seq object :
$seq1 = $gb->get_Seq_by_id('MUSIGHBA1');
# this also returns a Seq object :
$seq2 = $gb->get_Seq_by_acc('AF303112');
# this returns a SeqIO object, which can be used to get a Seq object :
$seqio = $gb->get_Stream_by_id(["J00522","AF303112","2981014"]);
$seq3 = $seqio->next_seq;

Can you make it print all the sequence descriptions?

Transforming sequence files (SeqIO)

A common - and tedious - bioinformatics task is that of converting sequence data
among the many widely used data formats. Bioperl's SeqIO object, however, makes
this chore a breeze. SeqIO can read a stream of sequences - located in a single or in
multiple files - in a number of formats including Fasta, EMBL, GenBank, Swissprot,
SCF, phd/phred, Ace, fastq, exp, chado, or raw (plain sequence). SeqIO can also parse
tracefiles in alf, ztr, abi, ctf, and ctr format Once the sequence data has been read in
with SeqIO, it is available to Bioperl in the form of Seq, PrimarySeq, or RichSeq
objects, depending on what the sequence source is. Moreover, the sequence objects
can then be written to another file using SeqIO in any of the supported data formats
making data converters simple to implement, for example:
use Bio::SeqIO;
$in = Bio::SeqIO->new(-file => "inputfilename",
-format => 'Fasta');
$out = Bio::SeqIO->new(-file => ">outputfilename",
-format => 'EMBL');
while ( my $seq = $in->next_seq() ) {$out->write_seq($seq); }

In addition, the Perl ``tied filehandle'' syntax is available to SeqIO, allowing you to
use the standard <> and print operations to read and write sequence objects, eg:
$in

= Bio::SeqIO->newFh(-file => "inputfilename" ,

-format => 'fasta');
$out = Bio::SeqIO->newFh(-format => 'embl');
print $out $_ while <$in>;

If the ``-format'' argument isn't used then Bioperl will try to determine the format based
on the file's suffix, in a case-insensitive manner. If there's no suffix available then SeqIO
will attempt to guess the format based on actual content. If it can't determine the format
then it will assume ``fasta''. A complete list of formats and suffixes can be found in the
SeqIO HOWTO (http://www.bioperl.org/wiki/HOWTO:SeqIO).
Practice: Get the sequences AJ312413, NP_001073624, XM_001807534 with accession
number from genbank and write them to a file in fasta format.

Transforming alignment files (AlignIO)

Data files storing multiple sequence alignments also appear in varied formats. AlignIO is
the Bioperl object for conversion of alignment files. AlignIO is patterned on the SeqIO
object and its commands have many of the same names as the commands in SeqIO. Just as
in SeqIO the AlignIO object can be created with ``-file'' and ``-format'' options:
use Bio::AlignIO;
my $io = Bio::AlignIO->new(-file
=> "example.aln",
-format => "clustalw" );

If the ``-format'' argument isn't used then Bioperl will try and determine the format based
on the file's suffix, in a case-insensitive manner. Here is the current set of suffixes:
Format
bl2seq
clustalw
emboss*
fasta
maf
mase
mega
meme
metafasta
msf
nexus
pfam
phylip
po
prodom
psi
selex
stockholm

Suffixes

Comment

aln
water|needle
fasta|fast|seq|fa|fsa|nt|aa
maf
Seaview
meg|mega
meme
msf|pileup|gcg
nexus|nex
pfam|pfm
phylip|phlp|phyl|phy|phy|ph
psi
selex|slx|selx|slex|sx

GCG
interleaved
POA
PSI-BLAST
HMMER

*water, needle, matcher, stretcher, merger, and supermatcher.
Unlike SeqIO, AlignIO cannot create output files in every format. AlignIO currently
supports output in these 7 formats: fasta, mase, selex, clustalw, msf/gcg, phylip
(interleaved), and po.
Another significant difference between AlignIO and SeqIO is that AlignIO handles IO for
only a single alignment at a time but SeqIO.pm handles IO for multiple sequences in a
single stream. Syntax for AlignIO is almost identical to that of SeqIO:
use Bio::AlignIO;
$in = Bio::AlignIO->new(-file => "inputfilename" ,
-format => 'clustalw');
$out = Bio::AlignIO->new(-file => ">outputfilename",
-format => 'fasta');
while ( my $aln = $in->next_aln() ) { $out->write_aln($aln); }

The only difference is that the returned object reference, $aln, is to a SimpleAlign object
rather than to a Seq object.

AlignIO also supports the tied filehandle syntax described above for SeqIO. See the
Bio::AlignIO manpage, the Bio::SimpleAlign manpage,

Manipulating sequence data with Seq methods

Seq provides multiple methods for performing many common (and some not-so-
common) tasks of sequence manipulation and data retrieval. Here are some of the
most useful:

These methods return strings or may be used to set values:

$seqobj->display_id();
$seqobj->seq();
$seqobj->subseq(5,10);
$seqobj->accession_number();
$seqobj->alphabet();
$seqobj->primary_id();
$seqobj->description();

#
#
#
#
#
#
#
#

the human read-able id of the sequence

string of sequence
part of the sequence as a string
when there, the accession number
one of 'dna','rna','protein'
a unique id for this sequence irregardless
of its display_id or accession number
a description of the sequence

It is worth mentioning that some of these values correspond to specific fields of

given formats. For example, the display_id() method returns the LOCUS name of a
Genbank entry, the (\S+) following the > character in a Fasta file, the ID from a
SwissProt file, and so on. The description() method will return the DEFINITION line
of a Genbank file, the line following the display_id in a Fasta file, and the DE field in a
SwissProt file.

The following methods return an array of Bio::SeqFeature objects:

$seqobj->get_SeqFeatures;
$seqobj->get_all_SeqFeatures;

# The 'top level' sequence features

# All sequence features, including sub# seq features

For a comment annotation, you can use:

use Bio::Annotation::Comment;
$seq->annotation->add_Annotation('comment',
Bio::Annotation::Comment->new(-text => 'some description');

For a reference annotation, you can use:

use Bio::Annotation::Reference;
$seq->annotation->add_Annotation('reference',
Bio::Annotation::Reference->new(-authors =>
-title
=>
-location =>
-medline =>

'author1,author2',
'title line',
'location line',
998122 );

A general description of the object can be found in the Bio::SeqFeature::Generic

manpage, and a description of related, top-level annotation is found in
Bio::Annotation::Collection manpage. There's also a HOWTO on features and

annotations ( http://bioperl.org/HOWTOs/html/Feature-Annotation.html ) and there's

a section on features in the FAQ ( http://bioperl.org/Core/Latest/faq.html#5 ).

The following methods returns new sequence objects, but do not transfer the features
from the starting object to the resulting feature:
$seqobj->trunc(5,10);
$seqobj->revcom;
$seqobj->translate;

# truncation from 5 to 10 as new object

# reverse complements sequence
# translation of the sequence

**Note that some methods return strings, some return arrays and some return
objects. See the Bio::Seq manpage for more information.
Many of these methods are self-explanatory. However, the flexible translation() method
needs some explanation. Translation in bioinformatics can mean two slightly different
things:
1. Translating a nucleotide sequence from start to end.
2. Translate the actual coding regions in mRNAs or cDNAs.
The Bioperl implementation of sequence translation does the first of these tasks easily.
Any sequence object which is not of alphabet 'protein' can be translated by simply calling
the method which returns a protein sequence object:
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate;

All codons will be translated, including those before and after any initiation and
termination codons. For example, ttttttatgccctaggggg will be translated to FFMP*G
However, the translate() method can also be passed several optional parameters to
modify its behavior. For example, you can tell translate() to modify the characters used
to represent terminator (default '*') and unknown amino acids (default 'X').
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate(-terminator => '-');
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate(-unknown => '_');

You can also determine the frame of the translation. The default frame starts at the first
nucleotide (frame 0). To get translation in the next frame, we would write:
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate(-frame => 1);

The codontable_id argument to translate() makes it possible to use alternative genetic

codes. There are currently 16 codon tables defined, including 'Standard', 'Vertebrate
Mitochondrial', 'Bacterial', 'Alternative Yeast Nuclear' and 'Ciliate, Dasycladacean and
Hexamita Nuclear'. All these tables can be seen in the Bio::Tools::CodonTable manpage.
For example, for mitochondrial translation:
$prot_obj = $seq_obj->translate(-codontable_id => 2);

If we want to translate full coding regions (CDS) the way major nucleotide databanks
EMBL, GenBank and DDBJ do it, the translate() method has to perform more checks.
Specifically, translate()needs to confirm that the sequence has appropriate start and
terminator codons at the very beginning and the very end of the sequence and that there
are no terminator codons present within the sequence in frame 0. In addition, if the
genetic code being used has an atypical (non-ATG) start codon, the translate() method
needs to convert the initial amino acid to methionine. These checks and conversions are
triggered by setting ``complete'' to 1:
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate(-complete => 1);
If ``complete'' is set to true and the criteria for a proper CDS are not met, the method, by
default, issues a warning. By setting ``throw'' to 1, one can instead instruct the program to
die if an improper CDS is found, e.g.
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate(-complete => 1,
-throw => 1);

You can also create a custom codon table and pass this object to translate:
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate(-codontable => $table_obj);
translate() can also find the open reading frame (ORF) starting at the 1st initiation

codon in the nucleotide sequence, regardless of its frame, and translate that:
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate(-orf => 1);

Most of the codon tables used by translate() have initiation codons in addition to ATG,
including the default codon table, NCBI ``Standard''. To tell translate() to use only ATG,
or atg, as the initiation codon set -start to ``atg'':
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate(-orf => 1,

-start => "atg" );

The -start argument only applies when -orf is set to 1.

Last trick. By default translate() will translate the termination codon to some special
character (the default is *, but this can be reset using the -terminator argument).
When -complete is set to 1 this character is removed. So, with this:
$prot_obj = $my_seq_object->translate(-orf => 1,

-complete => 1);

the sequence tttttatgccctaggggg will be translated to MP, not MP*.

See the Bio::Tools::CodonTable manpage and the Bio::PrimarySeqI manpage for more
information on translation.

Obtaining basic sequence statistics (SeqStats,SeqWord)

In addition to the methods directly available in the Seq object, bioperl provides
various helper objects to determine additional information about a sequence. For
example, SeqStats object provides methods for obtaining the molecular weight of

the sequence as well the number of occurrences of each of the component residues
(bases for a nucleic acid or amino acids for a protein.) For nucleic acids, SeqStats
also returns counts of the number of codons used. For example:
use SeqStats;
$seq_stats = Bio::Tools::SeqStats->new($seqobj);
$weight = $seq_stats->get_mol_wt();
$monomer_ref = $seq_stats->count_monomers();
$codon_ref = $seq_stats->count_codons(); # for nucleic acid sequence

Note: sometimes sequences will contain ambiguous codes. For this reason,
get_mol_wt() returns a reference to a two element array containing a greatest
lower bound and a least upper bound of the molecular weight.
The SeqWords object is similar to SeqStats and provides methods for calculating
frequencies of ``words'' (e.g. tetramers or hexamers) within the sequence. See the
Bio::Tools::SeqStats manpage and the Bio::Tools::SeqWords manpage for more
information.

Identifying restriction enzyme sites (Bio::Restriction)

Another common sequence manipulation task for nucleic acid sequences is locating
restriction enzyme cutting sites. Bioperl provides the Bio::Restriction::Enzyme,
Bio::Restriction::EnzymeCollection, and Bio::Restriction::Analysis objects for this
purpose.
A new collection of enzyme objects would be defined like this:
use Bio::Restriction::EnzymeCollection;
my $all_collection = Bio::Restriction::EnzymeCollection;

Bioperl's default Restriction::EnzymeCollection object comes with data for more

than 500 different Type II restriction enzymes. A list of the available enzyme names
can be accessed using the available_list() method, but these are just the names,
not the functional objects. You also have access to enzyme subsets. For example to
select all available Enzyme objects with recognition sites that are six bases long one
could write:
my $six_cutter_collection = $all_collection->cutters(6);
for my $enz ($six_cutter_collection){
print $enz->name,"\t",$enz->site,"\t",$enz->overhang_seq,"\n";
# prints name, recognition site, overhang
}

There are other methods that can be used to select sets of enzyme objects, such as
unique_cutters() and blunt_enzymes(). You can also select a Enzyme object by
name, like so:
my $ecori_enzyme = $all_collection->get_enzyme('EcoRI');

Once an appropriate enzyme has been selected, the sites for that enzyme on a given
nucleic acid sequence can be obtained using the fragments() method. The syntax
for performing this task is:
use Bio::Restriction::Analysis;

my $analysis = Bio::Restriction::Analysis->new(-seq => $seq);

# where $seq is the Bio::Seq object for the DNA to be cut
@fragments = $analysis->fragments($enzyme);
# and @fragments will be an array of strings

For more information, including creating your own RE database (REBASE), see the
Bio::Restriction::Enzyme manpage, the Bio::Restriction::EnzymeCollection manpage,
the Bio::Restriction::Analysis manpage, and the Bio::Restriction::IO manpage.

Identifying amino acid cleavage sites (Sigcleave)
Predict aa cleavage sites. Please see the Bio::Tools::Sigcleave manpage for details

Miscellaneous sequence utilities: OddCodes, SeqPattern

OddCodes: listing of an amino acid sequence showing where the functional aspects of
amino acids are located or where the positively charged ones are. See the documentation
in the Bio::Tools::OddCodes manpage for further details.
SeqPattern: used to manipulate sequences using Perl regular expressions. More detail can
be found in the Bio::Tools::SeqPattern manpage.

Converting coordinate systems (Coordinate::Pair, RelSegment)

Coordinate system conversion is a common requirement, for example, when one

wants to look at the relative positions of sequence features to one another and
convert those relative positions to absolute coordinates along a chromosome or
contig. Although coordinate conversion sounds pretty trivial it can get fairly tricky
when one includes the possibilities of switching to coordinates on negative (i.e.
Crick) strands and/or having a coordinate system terminate because you have
reached the end of a clone or contig.
For more details on coordinate transformations and other GFF-related capabilities in
Bioperl see the Bio::DB::GFF::RelSegment manpage, the Bio::DB::GFF manpage

Searching for similar sequences

Running BLAST (using RemoteBlast.pm)
A skeleton script to run a remote blast might look as follows:
$remote_blast = Bio::Tools::Run::RemoteBlast->new (
-prog => 'blastp', -data => 'ecoli', -expect => '1e-10' );
$r = $remote_blast->submit_blast("t/data/ecolitst.fa");
while (@rids = $remote_blast->each_rid ) {
for $rid ( @rids ) {$rc = $remote_blast->retrieve_blast($rid);}
}

You may want to change some parameter of the remote job and this example shows
how to change the matrix:
$Bio::Tools::Run::RemoteBlast::HEADER{'MATRIX_NAME'} = 'BLOSUM25';

For a description of the many CGI parameters see:

 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST/Doc/urlapi.html
Note that the script has to be broken into two parts. The actual Blast submission and
the subsequent retrieval of the results. At times when the NCBI Blast is being heavily
used, the interval between when a Blast submission is made and when the results
are available can be substantial.
The object $rc would contain the blast report that could then be parsed with
Bio::Tools::BPlite or Bio::SearchIO. The default object returned is SearchIO after
version 1.0. The object type can be changed using the -readmethod parameter but
bear in mind that the favored Blast parser is Bio::SearchIO, others won't be
supported in later versions.
**Note that to make this script actually useful, one should add details such as
checking return codes from the Blast to see if it succeeded and a ``sleep'' loop to
wait between consecutive requests to the NCBI server. See the
Bio::Tools::Run::RemoteBlast manpage for details.
It should also be noted that the syntax for creating a remote blast factory is slightly
different from that used in creating StandAloneBlast, Clustalw, and T-Coffee
factories. Specifically RemoteBlast requires parameters to be passed with a leading
hyphen, as in '-prog' => 'blastp', while the other programs do not pass
parameters with a leading hyphen.

Parsing BLAST and FASTA reports with Search and SearchIO

No matter how Blast searches are run (locally or remotely, with or without a Perl
interface), they return large quantities of data that are tedious to sift through.
Bioperl offers several different objects - Search.pm/SearchIO.pm, and BPlite.pm
(along with its minor modifications, BPpsilite and BPbl2seq) for parsing Blast
reports. Search and SearchIO which are the principal Bioperl interfaces for Blast and
FASTA report parsing, are described in this section. The older BPlite is described in
section III.4.3. We recommend you use SearchIO, it's certain to be supported in
future releases.
The Search and SearchIO modules provide a uniform interface for parsing sequence-
similarity-search reports generated by BLAST (in standard and BLAST XML
formats), PSI-BLAST, RPS-BLAST, bl2seq and FASTA. The SearchIO modules also
provide a parser for HMMER reports and in the future, it is envisioned that the
Search/SearchIO syntax will be extended to provide a uniform interface to an even
wider range of report parsers including parsers for Genscan.
Parsing sequence-similarity reports with Search and SearchIO is straightforward.
Initially a SearchIO object specifies a file containing the report(s). The method
next_result() reads the next report into a Search object in just the same way that
the next_seq() method of SeqIO reads in the next sequence in a file into a Seq
object.
Once a report (i.e. a SearchIO object) has been read in and is available to the script,
the report's overall attributes (e.g. the query) can be determined and its individual

hits can be accessed with the next_hit() method. Individual high-scoring segment
pairs for each hit can then be accessed with the next_hsp() method. Except for the
additional syntax required to enable the reading of multiple reports in a single file,
the remainder of the Search/SearchIO parsing syntax is very similar to that of the
BPlite object it is intended to replace. Sample code to read a BLAST report might
look like this:
# Get the report
$searchio = new Bio::SearchIO (-format => 'blast',
-file
=> $blast_report);
$result = $searchio->next_result;
# Get info about the entire report
$result->database_name;
$algorithm_type = $result->algorithm;
# get info about the first hit
$hit = $result->next_hit;
$hit_name = $hit->name ;
# get info about the first hsp of the first hit
$hsp = $hit->next_hsp;
$hsp_start = $hsp->query->start;

For more details there is a good description of how to use SearchIO at

http://www.bioperl.org/HOWTOs/html/SearchIO.html or in the docs/howto
subdirectory of the distribution. Additional documentation can be found in the
Bio::SearchIO::blast manpage, the Bio::SearchIO::psiblast manpage, the
Bio::SearchIO::blastxml manpage, the Bio::SearchIO::fasta manpage, and the
Bio::SearchIO manpage. There is also sample code in the examples/searchio
directory which illustrates how to use SearchIO. And finally, there's a section with
SearchIO questions in the FAQ ( http://bioperl.org/Core/Latest/faq.html#3 ).

Parsing BLAST reports with BPlite, BPpsilite, and BPbl2seq

Bioperl's older BLAST report parsers - BPlite, BPpsilite, BPbl2seq and Blast.pm - are
no longer supported but since legacy Bioperl scripts have been written which use
these objects, they are likely to remain within Bioperl for some time.
A complete description of the module can be found in the Bio::Tools::BPlite
manpage.

RefSeq Accession abbreviation key:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/RefSeq/key.html - accessions