Sequence search API

Overview

The RNAcentral sequence similarity search API allows you to perform most of the same actions through your own tools as you can through the web interface. Any tool capable of making HTTP requests can communicate with this API, for example curl.

API Throttling

The maximum number of requests from the same IP address is limited to 50 requests per minute.

Example script

An example of a Python script to perform searches for each record of a FASTA file is provided below. It uses the biopython package and requires python >= 3.5.

You can use this script to search for sequences in the RNAcentral database or in one of the Expert Databases.

The results will be organized in a new directory. A file in JSON format containing the metadata and the search results will be created. This file will be named with the description of the sequence. Here is an example:

results
|-- URS00001F7A66_9031 Gallus gallus (chicken) gga-let-7g-5p.json
|-- ...