As I blogged about previously my Amber Biology colleague, Gordon Webster and I are writing a book Python For The Life Sciences, and today we are releasing a sample chapter.

In this chapter we show you how to extract and examine data generated from cellular interaction networks, sometimes affectionately known as “hairball” data. In particular, we’ll show  you an example of reading in data on transcription factor networks from yeast. We will take you through the steps of reading in files; creation of set data structures and simple queries.  To give you a flavour, here’s a brief extract from the Chapter (the full sample chapter is available as a PDF download):

A set, as you might recall from distantly remembered introductory maths classes, contains only unique members.  In the context of the data structures for transcription networks, this means for each transcription factor, we only need…