PyCellBase is a Python package that provides programmatic access to the comprehensive RESTful web service API that has been implemented for the CellBase database, providing an easy, lightweight, fast and intuitive access to it.
This package can be used to access to relevant biological information in a user-friendly way without the need of local databases installations.
Data is always available by a high-availability cluster and queries have been tuned to ensure a real-time performance.
PyCellBase offers the convenience of an object-oriented scripting language and provides the ability to integrate the obtained results into other Python applications.
The CellBaseClient class provides access to the different clients of the data we want to query (e.g. gene, transcript, variation, protein, genomic region, variant).
Each of these clients provide a set of methods to ask for the resources we want to retrieve. Most of these methods will need to be provided with comma-separated IDs or list of IDs. Optional filters and extra options can be added as key-value parameters.
Responses are retrieved as JSON formatted data. Therefore, fields can be queried by key.
If there is an available resource, but there is not an available method in this python package, the CellBaseClient class can be used to create the URL of interest. This class is able to access the RESTful Web Services through the get method it implements. In this case, this method needs to be provided with those parameters which are required by the URL: category (e.g. feature), subcategory (e.g. gene), ID to search for (e.g. BRCA1) and method to query (e.g. search).
Configuration data as host, API version, or species is stored in a ConfigClient object. A custom configuration can be passed to CellBaseClient with a ConfigClient object provided with a JSON or YAML config file. If you want to change the configuration on the fly you can directly modify the ConfigClient object.