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gget Database Information

skills/gget/references/database_info.md

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gget Database Information

Overview of databases queried by gget modules, including update frequencies and important considerations.

Important Note

The databases queried by gget are continuously being updated, which sometimes changes their structure. gget modules are tested automatically on a biweekly basis and updated to match new database structures when necessary. For reproducible environments matching this skill, pin the current verified version:

bash
uv pip install "gget==0.30.5"

Database Directory

Genomic Reference Databases

Ensembl

  • Used by: gget ref, gget search, gget info, gget seq
  • Description: Comprehensive genome database with annotations for vertebrate and invertebrate species
  • Update frequency: Regular releases (numbered); new releases approximately every 3 months
  • Access: FTP downloads, REST API
  • Website: https://www.ensembl.org/
  • Notes:
    • Supports both vertebrate and invertebrate genomes
    • Can specify release number for reproducibility
    • Shortcuts available for common species ('human', 'mouse')

UCSC Genome Browser

  • Used by: gget blat
  • Description: Genome browser database with BLAT alignment tool
  • Update frequency: Regular updates with new assemblies
  • Access: Web service API
  • Website: https://genome.ucsc.edu/
  • Notes:
    • Multiple genome assemblies available (hg38, mm39, etc.)
    • BLAT optimized for vertebrate genomes

Protein & Structure Databases

UniProt

  • Used by: gget info, gget seq (amino acid sequences), gget elm
  • Description: Universal Protein Resource, comprehensive protein sequence and functional information
  • Update frequency: Regular releases (weekly for Swiss-Prot, monthly for TrEMBL)
  • Access: REST API
  • Website: https://www.uniprot.org/
  • Notes:
    • Swiss-Prot: manually annotated and reviewed
    • TrEMBL: automatically annotated

NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information)

  • Used by: gget info, gget bgee (for non-Ensembl species)
  • Description: Gene and protein databases with extensive cross-references
  • Update frequency: Continuous updates
  • Access: E-utilities API
  • Website: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
  • Databases: Gene, Protein, RefSeq

RCSB PDB (Protein Data Bank)

  • Used by: gget pdb
  • Description: Repository of 3D structural data for proteins and nucleic acids
  • Update frequency: Weekly updates
  • Access: REST API
  • Website: https://www.rcsb.org/
  • Notes:
    • Experimentally determined structures (X-ray, NMR, cryo-EM)
    • Includes metadata about experiments and publications

ELM (Eukaryotic Linear Motif)

  • Used by: gget elm
  • Description: Database of functional sites in eukaryotic proteins
  • Update frequency: Periodic updates
  • Access: Downloaded database (via gget setup elm)
  • Website: http://elm.eu.org/
  • Notes:
    • Requires local download before first use
    • Contains validated motifs and patterns

Sequence Similarity Databases

BLAST Databases (NCBI)

  • Used by: gget blast
  • Description: Pre-formatted databases for BLAST searches
  • Update frequency: Regular updates
  • Access: NCBI BLAST API
  • Databases:
    • Nucleotide: nt (all GenBank), refseq_rna, pdbnt
    • Protein: nr (non-redundant), swissprot, pdbaa, refseq_protein
  • Notes:
    • nt and nr are very large databases
    • Consider specialized databases for faster, more focused searches

Expression & Correlation Databases

ARCHS4

  • Used by: gget archs4
  • Description: Massive mining of publicly available RNA-seq data
  • Update frequency: Periodic updates with new samples
  • Access: HTTP API
  • Website: https://maayanlab.cloud/archs4/
  • Data:
    • Human and mouse RNA-seq data
    • Correlation matrices
    • Tissue expression atlases
  • Citation: Lachmann et al., Nature Communications, 2018

CZ CELLxGENE Discover

  • Used by: gget cellxgene
  • Description: Single-cell RNA-seq data from multiple studies
  • Update frequency: Continuous additions of new datasets
  • Access: Census API (via cellxgene-census package)
  • Website: https://cellxgene.cziscience.com/
  • Data:
    • Single-cell RNA-seq count matrices
    • Cell type annotations
    • Tissue and disease metadata
  • Notes:
    • Requires gget setup cellxgene
    • Gene symbols are case-sensitive
    • May not support latest Python versions

Bgee

  • Used by: gget bgee
  • Description: Gene expression and orthology database
  • Update frequency: Regular releases
  • Access: REST API
  • Website: https://www.bgee.org/
  • Data:
    • Gene expression across tissues and developmental stages
    • Orthology relationships across species
  • Citation: Bastian et al., 2021

Functional & Pathway Databases

Enrichr / modEnrichr

  • Used by: gget enrichr
  • Description: Gene set enrichment analysis web service
  • Update frequency: Regular updates to underlying databases
  • Access: REST API
  • Website: https://maayanlab.cloud/Enrichr/
  • Databases included:
    • KEGG pathways
    • Gene Ontology (GO)
    • Transcription factor targets (ChEA)
    • Disease associations (GWAS Catalog)
    • Cell type markers (PanglaoDB)
  • Notes:
    • Supports multiple model organisms
    • Background gene lists can be provided for custom enrichment

Disease & Drug Databases

Open Targets

  • Used by: gget opentargets
  • Description: Integrative platform for disease-target associations
  • Update frequency: Regular releases (quarterly)
  • Access: GraphQL API
  • Website: https://www.opentargets.org/
  • Data:
    • Disease associations
    • Drug information and clinical trials
    • Target tractability
    • Pharmacogenetics
    • Gene expression
    • DepMap gene-disease effects
    • Protein-protein interactions

cBioPortal

  • Used by: gget cbio
  • Description: Cancer genomics data portal
  • Update frequency: Continuous addition of new studies
  • Access: Web API, downloadable datasets
  • Website: https://www.cbioportal.org/
  • Data:
    • Mutations, copy number alterations, structural variants
    • Gene expression
    • Clinical data
  • Notes:
    • Large datasets; caching recommended
    • Multiple cancer types and studies available

COSMIC (Catalogue Of Somatic Mutations In Cancer)

  • Used by: gget cosmic
  • Description: Comprehensive cancer mutation database
  • Update frequency: Regular releases
  • Access: Download (requires account and license for commercial use)
  • Website: https://cancer.sanger.ac.uk/cosmic
  • Data:
    • Somatic mutations in cancer
    • Gene census
    • Cell line data
    • Drug resistance mutations
  • Important:
    • Free for academic use
    • License fees apply for commercial use
    • Requires COSMIC account credentials
    • Prefer the interactive prompt or named environment variables over credentials in CLI arguments
    • Must download database before querying

NCBI Virus / INSDC

  • Used by: gget virus
  • Description: Viral nucleotide sequences and metadata from International Nucleotide Sequence Database Collaboration sources, accessed via NCBI Virus and optionally enriched with GenBank metadata
  • Update frequency: Continuous additions and corrections
  • Access: NCBI Virus / NCBI datasets APIs and bundled NCBI datasets CLI for optimized SARS-CoV-2 and Alphainfluenza paths
  • Website: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/virus/
  • Data:
    • Viral nucleotide FASTA sequences
    • Metadata CSV/JSONL
    • Optional GenBank XML/CSV metadata and protein/gene annotations
  • Notes:
    • Use restrictive host/completeness/date/length filters for broad taxa
    • Keep command summaries for reproducibility and recovery
    • Avoid unfiltered --download_all_accessions

8cubeDB

  • Used by: gget 8cube
  • Description: snRNA-seq-derived gene specificity and normalized expression metrics across mouse strains, tissues, sexes, and individuals
  • Update frequency: Project/version dependent
  • Access: 8cubeDB web API
  • Website: https://eightcubedb.onrender.com/
  • Data:
    • Gene-level specificity metrics
    • Block-level specificity metrics
    • Mean and variance of normalized expression

AI & Prediction Services

AlphaFold2 (DeepMind)

  • Used by: gget alphafold
  • Description: Deep learning model for protein structure prediction
  • Model version: Simplified version for local execution
  • Access: Local computation (requires model download via gget setup)
  • Website: https://alphafold.ebi.ac.uk/
  • Notes:
    • Requires ~4GB model parameters download
    • Requires OpenMM installation
    • Computationally intensive
    • Python version-specific requirements

OpenAI API

  • Used by: gget gpt
  • Description: Large language model API
  • Update frequency: New models released periodically
  • Access: REST API (requires API key)
  • Website: https://openai.com/
  • Notes:
    • Default model: gpt-3.5-turbo
    • Requires an API key; prefer OPENAI_API_KEY in Python workflows and avoid hard-coded keys
    • Set billing limits to control costs

Data Consistency & Reproducibility

Version Control

To ensure reproducibility in analyses:

  1. Specify database versions/releases:

    python
    # Use specific Ensembl release
gget.ref("homo_sapiens", release=110)

# Use specific Census version
gget.cellxgene(gene=["PAX7"], census_version="2023-07-25")

  2. Document gget version:

    python
    import gget
print(gget.__version__)

    Current verified version for this skill: 0.30.5 (requires Python >=3.8).

  3. Save raw data:

    python
    # Always save results for reproducibility
results = gget.search(["ACE2"], species="homo_sapiens")
results.to_csv("search_results_2025-01-15.csv", index=False)

Handling Database Updates

  1. Regular gget updates:

    • Update gget biweekly to match database structure changes
    • Check release notes for breaking changes

  2. Error handling:

  3. API rate limiting:

    • Implement delays for large-scale queries
    • Use local databases (DIAMOND, COSMIC) when possible
    • Cache results to avoid repeated queries
    • For gget virus, use restrictive filters and resume partial downloads with baseline/merge options

Database-Specific Best Practices

Ensembl

  • Use species shortcuts ('human', 'mouse') for convenience
  • Specify release numbers for reproducibility
  • Check available species with gget ref --list_species

UniProt

  • UniProt IDs are more stable than gene names
  • Swiss-Prot annotations are manually curated and more reliable
  • Use PDB flag in gget info only when needed (increases runtime)

BLAST/BLAT

  • Start with default parameters, then optimize
  • Use specialized databases (swissprot, refseq_protein) for focused searches
  • Consider E-value cutoffs based on query length

Expression Databases

  • Gene symbols are case-sensitive in CELLxGENE
  • ARCHS4 correlation data is based on co-expression patterns
  • Consider tissue-specificity when interpreting results

Cancer Databases

  • cBioPortal: cache data locally for repeated analyses
  • COSMIC: download appropriate database subset for your needs
  • Respect license agreements for commercial use
  • Keep COSMIC credentials out of shell history, notebooks, and committed files

Viral Databases

  • Prefer taxon/accession-specific gget virus queries over all-accession downloads
  • Check command_summary.txt after each run for errors, software versions, and output paths
  • Use GenBank metadata only when needed because it increases runtime and output size

Citations

When using gget, cite both the gget publication and the underlying databases:

gget: Luebbert, L. & Pachter, L. (2023). Efficient querying of genomic reference databases with gget. Bioinformatics. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac836

Database-specific citations: Check references/ directory or database websites for appropriate citations.