In DNA strings, symbols A and T are complements of each other, as are C and G. Given a nucleotide $$b$$, we denote its complementary nucleotide as $$\overline{b}$$. The reverse complement of a DNA string $$s = s_0s_1\ldots s_{n-1}$$ is the string $$\overline{s} = \overline{s_{n-1}}\,\overline{s_{n-2}}\ldots \overline{s_0}$$ formed by taking the complement of each nucleotide in $$s$$, then reversing the resulting string.
For example, the reverse complement of $$s$$ = GTCA is $$\bar{s}$$ = TGAC.
In the following interactive session, we assume the FASTA file data.fna1 to be located in the current directory.
>>> reverse_complement('GTCA') 'TGAC' >>> reverse_complement('CGATATATCCATAG') 'CTATGGATATATCG' >>> from Bio import SeqIO >>> reverse_complement(*SeqIO.parse('data.fna', 'fasta')) 'ACCGGGTTTT'