Hi,

The function makeTxDbFromBiomart doesn't seem to be working when I try to access the fungi mart. I try

myTxDb <- makeTxDbFromBiomart(biomart = "fungi_mart", dataset = "spombe_eg_gene", host="fungi.ensembl.org")

and get the following error:

Download and preprocess the 'transcripts' data frame ... No encoding supplied: defaulting to UTF-8.
OK
Download and preprocess the 'splicings' data frame ... No encoding supplied: defaulting to UTF-8.
OK
Download and preprocess the 'genes' data frame ... No encoding supplied: defaulting to UTF-8.
OK
Prepare the 'metadata' data frame ... Error in function (type, msg, asError = TRUE)  :
  Server denied you to change to the given directory

Is there a work around?

Here's the sessionInfo():

R version 3.4.3 (2017-11-30)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: OS X El Capitan 10.11.6

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.4/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib

locale:
[1] en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8/C/en_GB.UTF-8/en_GB.UTF-8

attached base packages:
[1] stats4    parallel  stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] GenomicFeatures_1.30.0 AnnotationDbi_1.40.0   Biobase_2.38.0         GenomicRanges_1.30.1  
[5] GenomeInfoDb_1.14.0    IRanges_2.12.0         S4Vectors_0.16.0       BiocGenerics_0.24.0   

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_0.12.14               pillar_1.1.0               compiler_3.4.3            
 [4] XVector_0.18.0             prettyunits_1.0.2          bitops_1.0-6              
 [7] tools_3.4.3                zlibbioc_1.24.0            progress_1.1.2            
[10] biomaRt_2.34.1             digest_0.6.14              bit_1.1-12                
[13] lattice_0.20-35            RSQLite_2.0                memoise_1.1.0             
[16] tibble_1.4.1               rlang_0.1.6                Matrix_1.2-12             
[19] DelayedArray_0.4.1         DBI_0.7                    curl_3.1                  
[22] GenomeInfoDbData_1.0.0     rtracklayer_1.38.2         stringr_1.2.0             
[25] httr_1.3.1                 Biostrings_2.46.0          grid_3.4.3                
[28] bit64_0.9-7                R6_2.2.2                   XML_3.98-1.9              
[31] RMySQL_0.10.13             BiocParallel_1.12.0        blob_1.1.0                
[34] magrittr_1.5               matrixStats_0.52.2         GenomicAlignments_1.14.1  
[37] Rsamtools_1.30.0           SummarizedExperiment_1.8.1 assertthat_0.2.0          
[40] stringi_1.1.6              RCurl_1.95-4.10 

I found the answer myself after a bit of digging around in the code for makeTxDbFromBiomart. The name of the mart for fungi has recently changed from fungal_mart to fungi_mart. However, this has not been reflected in the code for an internal function of the GenomicFeatures package:

.get_EnsemblGenomes_kingdom_from_biomart <- function (biomart) {
  biomart <- tolower(biomart)
  if (substr(biomart, 1, 14) == "bacterial_mart")
    return("bacteria")
  if (substr(biomart, 1, 11) == "fungal_mart")
    return("fungi")
  if (substr(biomart, 1, 12) == "metazoa_mart")
    return("metazoa")
  if (substr(biomart, 1, 11) == "plants_mart")
    return("plants")
  if (substr(biomart, 1, 12) == "protist_mart")
    return("protists")
  NA
}

Because of this, the makeTxDbFromBiomart function cannot correctly identify the kingdom, and thus cannot specify the host address to download the metadata, and the function fails.

To fix this, I downloaded the source package: http://bioconductor.org/packages/release/bioc/src/contrib/GenomicFeatures_1.30.0.tar.gz

I unzipped the package from the command line using tar -xvzf GenomicFeatures_1.30.0.tar.gz and the edited line 140 of the file R/makeTxDbFromBiomart.R to correctly specify fungi_mart:

if (substr(biomart, 1, 10) == "fungi_mart")

I then re-zipped the package and installed using:

tar -czvf GenomicFeatures.tar.gz GenomicFeatures

R CMD INSTALL GenomicFeatures.tar.gz

which gives me a successful TxDb download from Biomart.