Take input and use it in a function

I''m trying to write a program that can analyze protein relationship. I'm trying to make the user input the accession number of the protein, then save it in a variable, then load the sequence using the getgenpept function, but it doesn't seem to work! (Input AAA69808, NP_989750)

protein1=input('NCBI accession number  of the first protein: ', 's');
protein2=input('NCBI accession number  of the second protein: ', 's');

seq1 = getgenpept('protein1','SequenceOnly',true);
seq2 = getgenpept('protein2','SequenceOnly',true);

However, doing the folloiwng in MATLAB works fine:

human = getgenpept('AAA69808','SequenceOnly',true);
chicken = getgenpept('NP_989750','SequenceOnly',true);

Answer 1

[Geoff Hayes]

Ahmad - please clarify what you mean by it doesn't seem to work. Are you observing an error or are you not getting the correct/desired results?

If I look at the documentation for getgenpept, one of the examples is

 Seq = getgenpept('AAA59174')

and it produces some result. You have even shown that something like

 human = getgenpept('AAA69808','SequenceOnly',true);
 chicken = getgenpept('NP_989750','SequenceOnly',true);

works too. So what is different between the above two statements and your code that gets the input from the user? Note what you are doing

 protein1=input('NCBI accession number  of the first protein: ', 's');
 protein2=input('NCBI accession number  of the second protein: ', 's');

protein1 and protein2 are variables of data type char (so are string variables). With your input example this means that

 protein1 == 'AAA69808'
 protein2 == 'NP_989750'

Now since these are string variables and the first input to the getgenpept is a string variable, there is no need to wrap these variables in quotes like

 seq1 = getgenpept('protein1','SequenceOnly',true);
 seq2 = getgenpept('protein2','SequenceOnly',true);

because if you do, then what you are really passing this function are strings representing the variable name of protein1 or protein2 and not the value of the variable.

Remove the single quotes and change these two lines to

 seq1 = getgenpept(protein1,'SequenceOnly',true);
 seq2 = getgenpept(protein2,'SequenceOnly',true);

[Stephen23]

It might be a good time for the OP to read some documentation:

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/index.html#language-fundamentals

http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/data-types_data-types.html

Answer 2

[Ahmad]

Thank you so much