Rosalind Problems in Clojure

This weekend I’ve been having a lot of fun working the Bioinformatics problems from Rosalind. Most people work them in Python, but so far they have been very amenable to Clojure except where BioPython libraries are used for access to online databases. The problems have been straightforward so far but I have enjoyed the elegance and brevity that Clojure lends the solutions.

In particular, I like this short translator from RNA sequences to amino acids:

;;; Translating RNA into Amino Acids

(defmacro deftable [tname & rest]
  `(def ~tname (apply hash-map '(~@rest))))

(deftable proteins
  UUU F      CUU L      AUU I      GUU V
  UUC F      CUC L      AUC I      GUC V
  UUA L      CUA L      AUA I      GUA V
  UUG L      CUG L      AUG M      GUG V
  UCU S      CCU P      ACU T      GCU A
  UCC S      CCC P      ACC T      GCC A
  UCA S      CCA P      ACA T      GCA A
  UCG S      CCG P      ACG T      GCG A
  UAU Y      CAU H      AAU N      GAU D
  UAC Y      CAC H      AAC N      GAC D
  UAA Stop   CAA Q      AAA K      GAA E
  UAG Stop   CAG Q      AAG K      GAG E
  UGU C      CGU R      AGU S      GGU G
  UGC C      CGC R      AGC S      GGC G
  UGA Stop   CGA R      AGA R      GGA G
  UGG W      CGG R      AGG R      GGG G)

(defn to-protein [s]
  (->> s
       (partition 3)
       (map (partial apply str))
       (map symbol)
       (map proteins)
       (take-while #(not= % 'Stop))
       (apply str)))

The body of the proteins table is literally cut-and-pasted from the problem page (click on “RNA codon table”). I think it’s a good example of using macros to provide a little bit of syntactic sugar to make the code just a little more readable and elegant, or to encode domain facts as directly as possible.

This and my other solutions so far are up on GitHub.