NCBITaxa problem: Different behaviour between get_lineage and get_descendant_taxa

[openpaul]

When the taxid has to be changed only get_lineage works and not get_descendent_taxa:

from ete3 import NCBITaxa
ncbi = NCBITaxa()
ncbi.get_lineage(2599292)

results in:

[...]/lib/python3.7/site-packages/ete3/ncbi_taxonomy/ncbiquery.py:240: UserWarning: taxid 2599292 was translated into 400770
  warnings.warn("taxid %s was translated into %s" %(taxid, merged_conversion[taxid]))

[1, 131567, 2, 1224, 28211, 356, 45401, 46913, 400770]

Which is fine and expected.

Using the same TaxID with get_descendant_taxa does not work:

ncbi.get_descendant_taxa(id)

results in:

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
ValueError                                Traceback (most recent call last)
<ipython-input-3-0bee07a5e060> in <module>
----> 1 ncbi.get_descendant_taxa(2599292)

[...]/lib/python3.7/site-packages/ete3/ncbi_taxonomy/ncbiquery.py in get_descendant_taxa(self, parent, intermediate_nodes, rank_limit, collapse_subspecies, return_tree)
    353 
    354         if not found:
--> 355             raise ValueError("taxid not found:%s" %taxid)
    356         elif found == 1:
    357             return [taxid]

ValueError: taxid not found:2599292

If one instead uses the changed taxID it works well:

ncbi.get_descendant_taxa(400770)

[400770]

[jhcepas]

get_descendant_taxa is probably not reading the synonyms table. thanks for the report.