Accessing molecular-interaction databases with PSIQUIC

PSIQUIC (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/webservices/psicquic/view/main.xhtml) is a consistent interface to many molecular-interaction databases. It's used inside Cytoscape, which is the object of the next recipe. We take this as an opportunity to learn how to interact with PSIQUIC. In this recipe, we will use its REST interface to check the databases that are available and perform some basic querying. We will revisit this in the Cytoscape recipe. You can find this content in the 07_Other/PSICQUIC.ipynb notebook.

How to do it...

Take a look at the following steps:

1. First, let's define a convenient REST function as follows:

   from __future__ import print_function
   import requests
   def get_psiquic(service, query, full_url=False, **kwargs):
       kwargs['format'] = kwargs.get('format', 'tab27')
       if full_url:
           req = requests.get('%s%s' % (service, query), params=kwargs)
       else:
           server = \ 'http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/webservices/psicquic...