Taxonomy.dat is a large, publicly available list of organisms. The file is available from the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). It contains over 400,000 species:
[A sample record in Taxonomy.dat]
ID : 350094
PARENT ID : 343736
RANK : species
GC ID : 1
MGC ID : 5
SCIENTIFIC NAME : Omalisus fontisbellaquei
MISSPELLING : Omalisus fontisbellaquaei
MISSPELLING : Omalisis fontisbellaguei
//
The taxonomy.dat file exceeds 100 megabytes in length.
The taxonomy.dat file is available for public download through anonymous ftp.
[ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/taxonomy/]
Information about the taxonomy.dat file is found at:
[http://www.ebi.ac.uk/msd-srv/docs/dbdoc/ref_taxonomy.html]
Notice that the sample entry (above) provides an ID number for the entry organism, and for it's parent class. Since every organism and class has a parent, you can write a script that reconstructs the full phylogenetic lineage for any entry in taxonomy.dat.
In this blog, I include a Python script that parses through taxonomy.dat, builds a hash of all the child-parent relationships, then re-parses the file, building the phylogenetic lineage of each organism using the child-parent hash that was built in the first pass.
This Python script is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. in no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software.
A copy of the Python script is available at: http://www.julesberman.info/taxon.htm.
It takes under a minute to execute this script on a desktop computer running at 2.6 MHz with 512 MByte RAM. You may need this much RAM to provide memory for the hash (of child-parent relationships).
#!/usr/local/bin/python
import re
intext = open("taxonomy.dat", "r")
outtext = open("taxo.txt", "w")
parenthash = {}
namehash = {}
cum_line = ""
childnumber = ""
parentnumber = ""
child_match = re.compile('ID\s+\:\s*(\d+)\s*')
parent_match = re.compile('PARENT ID\s+\:\s*(\d+)\s*')
name_match = re.compile('SCIENTIFIC NAME\s+\:\s*([^\n]+)\s*')
end_match = re.compile('\/\/')
for line in intext:
p = end_match.search(line)
if p:
m = child_match.search(cum_line)
if m:
childnumber = m.group(1)
x = parent_match.search(cum_line)
if x:
parentnumber = x.group(1)
parenthash[childnumber] = parentnumber
y = name_match.search(cum_line)
if y:
scientific_name = y.group(1)
namehash[childnumber] = scientific_name
#print childnumber + " " + namehash[childnumber] + " " + parenthash[childnumber]
cum_line = ""
continue
else:
cum_line = cum_line + line
cum_line = ""
intext.close
intext = open("taxonomy.dat", "r")
for line in intext:
p = end_match.search(line)
if p:
print>>outtext, cum_line + "HIERARCHY"
z = child_match.search(cum_line)
if z:
id_name = z.group(1)
for i in range(30):
if namehash.has_key(id_name):
print>>outtext, namehash[id_name]
if parenthash.has_key(id_name):
id_name = parenthash[id_name]
print>>outtext, "//"
cum_line = ""
continue
else:
cum_line = cum_line + line
cum_line = ""
exit
The script produces an output file, taxo.txt that exceeds 224 Megabytes in length. The output consists of the taxonomic entries from taxonomy.dat, along with the phylogentic lineage for each organism.
An sample ancestral lineage, for "bison" is:
ID : 9900
PARENT ID : 27592
RANK : genus
GC ID : 1
MGC ID : 2
SCIENTIFIC NAME : Bison
HIERARCHY
Bison
Bovinae
Bovidae
Pecora
Ruminantia
Cetartiodactyla
Laurasiatheria
Eutheria
Theria
Mammalia
Amniota
Tetrapoda
Sarcopterygii
Euteleostomi
Teleostomi
Gnathostomata
Vertebrata
Craniata
Chordata
Deuterostomia
Coelomata
Bilateria
Eumetazoa
Metazoa
Fungi/Metazoa group
Eukaryota
cellular organisms
A web site that produces the phylogeny of any entered species (in taxonomy.dat) is available at: http://www.julesberman.info/post.htm
- Jules Berman
tags: python programming language, phylogeny, taxonomy, taxa, taxon, ancestral lineage, classification, phylogenetics, python script, scripting language, species, phylum, genus
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