What problem does it solve?
scikit-bio helps you perform end-to-end bioinformatics and microbial ecology analysis—turning biological sequence, alignment, tree, and count-table data into distances, diversity metrics, ordinations, and statistical test outputs.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Sequence I/O and manipulation: Read/write biological formats (e.g., FASTA/FASTQ/GenBank/Newick) and run validated sequence operations such as reverse-complement, transcription, translation, motif regex search, and distance calculations.
- Alignments and phylogenetics: Compute pairwise and multiple sequence alignments, construct and manipulate phylogenetic trees, and calculate tree distances and comparisons (e.g., patristic, cophenetic, Robinson–Foulds).
- Microbiome/community ecology analytics: Compute alpha and beta diversity (including UniFrac with trees), run ordination (PCoA/CCA/RDA), and perform distance-based hypothesis tests such as PERMANOVA and Mantel tests.
- Table and embedding support: Load BIOM-style feature tables, integrate with common data ecosystems (pandas/NumPy), and work with protein embeddings by converting them to distances/ordination.
Quick Start
Use the scikit-bio skill to compute alpha and beta diversity from a BIOM count table and an input phylogenetic tree, then summarize results with PCoA and run PERMANOVA for group differences.