> For the complete documentation index, see [llms.txt](https://igb.mit.edu/llms.txt). Markdown versions of documentation pages are available by appending `.md` to page URLs; this page is available as [Markdown](https://igb.mit.edu/mini-courses/python/biopython/about-biopython.md).

# About Biopython

[Biopython](http://biopython.org/wiki/Main_Page) is [a set of freely available tools](http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/api/module-tree.html) for biological computation written in python by an international team of developers. The tool is to "make it as easy as possible to use Python for bioinformatics by creating high-quality, reusable module and scripts." The source code is made available under the Biopython License, which is extremely liberal and compatible with almost every license in the world. Details refer [Biopython Tutorial](http://biopython.org/DIST/docs/tutorial/Tutorial.html).

* Some of the pricipal functions of biopython
  * A standard sequence class that deals with sequences, ids on sequences, and sequence features
  * Tools for performing common operations on sequences, such as translation, transcription and weight calculations
  * Code to perform classification of data using k Nearest Neighbors, Naive Bayes or Support Vector Machines
  * Code for dealing with alignments, including a standard way to create and deal with substitution matrices
  * Code making it easy to split up parallelizable tasks into separate processes
  * GUI-based programs to do basic sequence manipulations, translations, BLASTing,etc.