MafftCommandline and io.StringIO - io

Question

I've been trying to use the Mafft alignment tool from Bio.Align.Applications. Currently, I've had success writing my sequence information out to temporary text files that are then read by MafftCommandline(). However, I'd like to avoid redundant steps as much as possible, so I've been trying to write to a memory file instead using io.StringIO(). This is where I've been having problems. I can't get MafftCommandline() to read internal files made by io.StringIO(). I've confirmed that the internal files are compatible with functions such as AlignIO.read(). The following is my test code:
from Bio.Align.Applications import MafftCommandline
from Bio import SeqIO
from Bio.Seq import Seq
from Bio.SeqRecord import SeqRecord
import io
from Bio import AlignIO
sequences1 = ["AGGGGC",
"AGGGC",
"AGGGGGC",
"AGGAGC",
"AGGGGG"]
longest_length = max(len(s) for s in sequences1)
padded_sequences = [s.ljust(longest_length, '-') for s in sequences1] #padded sequences used to test compatibilty with AlignIO
ioSeq = ''
for items in padded_sequences:
ioSeq += '>unknown\n'
ioSeq += items + '\n'
newC = io.StringIO(ioSeq)
cLoc = str(newC).strip()
cLocEdit = cLoc[:len(cLoc)] #create string to remove < and >
test1Handle = AlignIO.read(newC, "fasta")
#test1HandleString = AlignIO.read(cLocEdit, "fasta") #fails to interpret cLocEdit string
records = (SeqRecord(Seq(s)) for s in padded_sequences)
SeqIO.write(records, "msa_example.fasta", "fasta")
test1Handle1 = AlignIO.read("msa_example.fasta", "fasta") #alignIO same for both #demonstrates working AlignIO
in_file = '.../msa_example.fasta'
mafft_exe = '/usr/local/bin/mafft'
mafft_cline = MafftCommandline(mafft_exe, input=in_file) #have to change file path
mafft_cline1 = MafftCommandline(mafft_exe, input=cLocEdit) #fails to read string (same as AlignIO)
mafft_cline2 = MafftCommandline(mafft_exe, input=newC)
stdout, stderr = mafft_cline()
print(stdout) #corresponds to MafftCommandline with input file
stdout1, stderr1 = mafft_cline1()
print(stdout1) #corresponds to MafftCommandline with internal file
I get the following error messages:
ApplicationError: Non-zero return code 2 from '/usr/local/bin/mafft <_io.StringIO object at 0x10f439798>', message "/bin/sh: -c: line 0: syntax error near unexpected token `newline'"
I believe this results due to the arrows ('<' and '>') present in the file path.
ApplicationError: Non-zero return code 1 from '/usr/local/bin/mafft "_io.StringIO object at 0x10f439af8"', message '/usr/local/bin/mafft: Cannot open _io.StringIO object at 0x10f439af8.'
Attempting to remove the arrows by converting the file path to a string and indexing resulted in the above error.
Ultimately my goal is to reduce computation time. I hope to accomplish this by calling internal memory instead of writing out to a separate text file. Any advice or feedback regarding my goal is much appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I can't get MafftCommandline() to read internal files made by
io.StringIO().
This is not surprising for a couple of reasons:
As you're aware, Biopython doesn't implement Mafft, it simply
provides a convenient interface to setup a call to mafft in
/usr/local/bin. The mafft executable runs as a separate process
that does not have access to your Python program's internal memory,
including your StringIO file.
The mafft program only works with an input file, it doesn't even
allow stdin as a data source. (Though it does allow stdout as a
data sink.) So ultimately, there must be a file in the file system
for mafft to open. Thus the need for your temporary file.
Perhaps tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() or tempfile.mkstemp() might be a reasonable compromise.