Unable to retrieve sequences using biomaRt::getsequence()
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Brob • 0
@brob-10131
Last seen 8.0 years ago

Dear all,

I have a problem concerning sequence retrieval via the getsequence() wrapper function implemented in the biomaRt package. I tried to download a list of sequences based on a list of ensembl transcript IDs. In the example below I included one ID as an example. Regardless of ID lists or single IDs or different sequence types, I always get the error message

Error in martCheck(mart, "ensembl") :
  This function only works when used with the ensembl BioMart.

 

My request:

source("http://bioconductor.org/biocLite.R")
biocLite("biomaRt")
library("biomaRt")

Sequences <-getSequence(id = "ENST00000225973", type = "ensembl_transcript_id", seqType = "cdna" , mart = useMart("ENSEMBL_MART_ENSEMBL",dataset = "hsapiens_gene_ensembl", host = "www.ensembl.org"))

In case you wonder why I specified the host: There is an issue with the main biomart portal: Problem with biomart's listMarts function

 

My sessionInfo():

R version 3.0.0 (2013-04-03)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
 [1] LC_CTYPE=en_GB.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C               LC_TIME=en_GB.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=en_GB.UTF-8     LC_MONETARY=en_GB.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_GB.UTF-8    LC_PAPER=C                
 [8] LC_NAME=C                  LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C             LC_MEASUREMENT=en_GB.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C       

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

other attached packages:
[1] biomaRt_2.18.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] RCurl_1.95-4.1 tools_3.0.0    XML_3.98-1.1 

 

It seems the problem also occurs with the getGene() wrapper (Error: This function only works when used with the ensembl BioMart.) and I have absolutely no clue what the underlying causes could be. So any ideas to bypass this problem are much appreciated!

Thanks for your thoughts!

Best regards,
Robin

biomart R connection • 1.4k views
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@james-w-macdonald-5106
Last seen 2 hours ago
United States

This issue was fixed quite a while ago, but you are still using a version of Bioconductor from before it was fixed! It's a very good idea to use the current version of R/Bioconductor, and certainly not one that is three years out of date.

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Thanks a lot for the information! With using this R/bioconductor version I tried to avoid package unavailability for more recent R versions. I'd really like to use 3.2.4 (or even 3.2.5) but as I'm working on an research institute's cluster without root permissions I'm doomed to take what they got (most recent version R-3.1.2). I'll address this point of this not-up-to-dateness.

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Entering edit mode

Depending on the amount of space they allot you in your home dir (or some other space to which you have write access), you may not be doomed at all. Most linux boxes will compile R without any fuss whatsoever, so you can just download the latest version from here, put it somewhere and then follow these instructions.

Note the line "Note: you do not need to install R: you can run it from where it was built.", which simply means you can add the dir containing the R binary to your path and use it from there. So if you use bash, and install R in your home dir, in say

/users/home/yourhomedir/R-3.2.5

then you can add

export PATH=/users/home/yourhomedir/R-3.2.5/bin:$PATH

to your .bashrc file, and then when you start R you will use your own personal updated version rather than that ancient version the sysadmin has installed.

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