Find all NCBI taxids in some group (e.g., all coronaviruses)

Question

[oddjobs]

I am trying to get the list of taxids of all coronaviruses which I plan to use in a script. Equivalently, the taxids of all viruses related to SARS-CoV is also a good starting point.

However, I do not know how to extract this information efficiently. I can find the following links with NCBI, however these links do not provide the information in a text/tabulated format that I can transport to a script: 1. SARS: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mode=Tree&id=694009&lvl=3&keep=1&srchmode=1&unlock 2. Coronaviruses: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Taxonomy/Browser/wwwtax.cgi?mode=Undef&id=11118&lvl=3&lin=f&keep=1&srchmode=1&unlock

I would need to click each organism in this page to find the taxid of an individual virus. Is there a more machine-readable source for this information? Alternatively, I may need to use some scripting to click each link etc - is there some efficient way to do that? I can think of the following, but both seem convoluted: 1. Inspect source of the page to find all links related to individual viruses 2. Use lynx browser on a terminal

Answer 1

[Istvan Albert]

You can also fetch as XML if you need more information :

esearch -db taxonomy -query txid694009[Subtree] | efetch -format xml > out.xml

then process with xtract:

cat out.xml | xtract -pattern Taxon -element TaxId,ScientificName | head

prints:

2709072 Bat coronavirus RaTG13
2697049 Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2
2042698 SARS-related betacoronavirus Rp3/2004
2042697 SARS-related bat coronavirus RsSHC014
1699361 Bat SARS-like coronavirus YNLF_34C
1699360 Bat SARS-like coronavirus YNLF_31C
1508227 Bat SARS-like coronavirus
1503303 BtRs-BetaCoV/YN2013
1503302 BtRs-BetaCoV/HuB2013
1503301 BtRs-BetaCoV/GX2013

[oddjobs]

Thanks! I wasn't aware of this utility before. It will probably be helpful for other things I want to do as well.

Answer 2

[GenoMax]

Not an elegant solution but I think this should work for now.

1. Go this link. This is a listing of subtree for 694009 taxID.
2. Send to drop down --> File --> Under Format --> choose taxid list.
3. Create File --> Save the file

Under Display settings if you choose Info option then you will get additional information (names, lineages etc).

[Istvan Albert]

You can also execute the solution by genomax from command line via:

esearch -db taxonomy -query txid694009[Subtree] | efetch | head

prints:

2709072
2697049
2042698
2042697
1699361
1699360
1508227

[oddjobs]

That's probably the closest I can get to what I want. The 200 is a limitation, but I can work with it for now. Thanks!

[GenoMax]

You should get all 261 in one file. Check updated instructions above.

Answer 3

[Joe]

You can use this script I added to Kai Blin's tool ncbi-genome-download:

https://github.com/kblin/ncbi-genome-download/blob/master/contrib/gimme_taxa.py

[oddjobs]

I see. Thanks. It's nice to have in script form as my goal is to use this in a script in the end. The ncbi-genome-download tool also seems quite useful. I will look up both.