new restriction analysis classes
Rob Edwards and Heikki Lehvaslaiho have been writing new restriction analysis classes. These will eventually replace the long serving Bio::Tools::RestrictionEnzyme by Steve Chervitz. The first working
versions are in CVS.
A UML graph shows the class relationships. A more verbose overview is below.
Bio::Restriction::Enzyme class knows (almost) everything there to know about restriction enzymes.
There are two subclasses of Enzyme: 1) Bio::Restriction::Enzyme::MultiSite and 2) Bio::Restriction::Enzyme::MultiCut that handle relatively rare cases when recognition sites of the enzyme is more complex than can be expressed using IUPAC code or there are four cut sites per site.
Bio::Restriction::EnzymeCollection object is a set of Enzymes. It is created by Bio::Restriction::IO. This class works like Bio::SeqIO class, but if you call it without parameters, you get a default selection of 530 bare-boned Enzymes.
If you want select your own set, you can read in data from REBASE database flat files. Two formats, itype2 and withrefm, are now supported.
Any attribute of an Enzyme can easily be used to filter them out of one collection into an other.
Bio::Restriction::Analysis uses an EnzymeCollection to cut any Bio::PrimarySeqI implementing sequence into fragments. There are methods to find enzymes that cut the sequence to a given number of time, or do not cut at all, and retrieve the fragments.