taxutils: Tools for managing and operating on NCBI taxonomy and accession mappings

Abstract

Research in bioinformatics demands that many workflows and operations be consistently repeated across different tools. These operations include managing a taxdump, dealing with accession mappings, and performing analysis on the taxonomic tree. We introduce taxutils to address and alleviate the strain of these common workflows. To exhibit the extent of the package's capabilities, we introduce a strategy for assessing quality of an assembly via its potential impact on and perturbation of its mapping to a lowest-common-ancestor index. We illustrate the steps required for such an analysis, and show how the tool makes data management easy and otherwise-complex workflows simple.