Digging through ENA records.
By using the Python library enasearch, which provides a Python-based interaction with ENA’s API, commandline searches of the ENA databases have become a delight.
Take, for example, the aim to infer the number of individual accessions of the common plant DNA barcoding marker trnK-matK that have become available over the course of the year 2017. This very specific aim can be achieved via the following command:
enasearch search_data \ --query 'organelle=plastid \ AND (first_public>2017-01-01 AND first_public<2018-01-01) \ AND (description="*matK*" OR description="*maturase K*") \ AND (description="*trnK*" OR description="*tRNA-Lys*") \ AND tax_division=PLN AND topology=LINEAR' \ --result sequence_release – display report | wc -l
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