EvolCat-Python: A User-Friendly Toolkit for Exploring the Language of Life

The blueprint of life, DNA, holds vast amounts of information. Scientists studying how life evolves and how different species are related often need to compare these genetic blueprints. This involves sifting through long strings of genetic code, finding similarities and differences, and understanding how these changes have occurred over time. Many powerful computer programs exist to help with this, but they can sometimes be complex to use, especially when dealing with very large amounts of data or when needing to perform many analytical steps in a row. This report introduces EvolCat-Python, a collection of computer tools designed to make some of these common tasks in genetic analysis easier and more accessible. It builds on ideas from an initial design document for a software package called "EvolCat," which aimed to provide straightforward, command-line tools for scientists, particularly biologists, who need to analyze genetic sequences without necessarily being expert programmers. EvolCat-Python brings this vision to life using the popular and versatile Python programming language. Hosted publicly on GitHub (https://github.com/bob-friedman/EvolCat-Python), this toolkit offers a range of functions for handling and analyzing DNA and protein sequences.