BioPerl Modules

Perl has long been a popular programming language for bioinformatics programmers due in part to its exceptional text search/manipulation properties. It is also an easy to use, yet powerful, scripting language. No doubt, anyone who has done any bioinformatics programming has done a bit of Perl programming and hopefully used BioPerl.

BioPerl is a great set of open source modules for Perl programming. These modules simplify many of the common tasks that bioinformatics programmers regularly deal with. BioPerl saves the programmer lots of time so it is worth putting in a little bit of effort to become familiar with the modules.

BioPerl provides modules for many common bioinformatics tasks. Here are some of the features that BioPerl has modules for:

• Accessing sequence data from local and remote databases
• Transforming formats of database/ file records
• Manipulating individual sequences
• Searching for similar sequences
• Creating and manipulating sequence alignments
• Searching for genes and other structures on genomic DNA
• Developing machine readable sequence annotations

Head on over to BioPerl’s Website and learn more about BioPerl.