How do I merge a list of GRanges?
2
2
Entering edit mode
endrebak85 ▴ 30
@endrebak85-10660
Last seen 4.6 years ago
github.com/endrebak/

I have a list of genomicRanges that look like the following:

> l3
[[1]]
GRanges object with 5000 ranges and 4 metadata columns:
         seqnames             ranges strand   |    Island
            <Rle>          <IRanges>  <Rle>   | <integer>
     [1]     chr1     [10050, 10051]      *   |         0
     [2]     chr1     [10100, 10101]      *   |         0
     [3]     chr1     [10200, 10201]      *   |         0
     [4]     chr1     [10250, 10251]      *   |         0
     [5]     chr1     [13250, 13251]      *   |         0
     ...      ...                ...    ... ...       ...
  [4996]     chr1 [1261250, 1261251]      *   |         0
  [4997]     chr1 [1261300, 1261301]      *   |         1
  [4998]     chr1 [1261350, 1261351]      *   |         1
  [4999]     chr1 [1261400, 1261401]      *   |         1
  [5000]     chr1 [1261600, 1261601]      *   |         1
         data.animal.Exp1_12h_PolII.bed data.animal.Exp1_12h_Input.bed
                              <integer>                      <integer>
     [1]                              0                              1
     [2]                              1                              2
     [3]                              1                              1
     [4]                              1                              0
     [5]                              1                              0
     ...                            ...                            ...
  [4996]                              0                              1
  [4997]                              3                              0
  [4998]                              1                              1
  [4999]                              1                              0
  [5000]                              2                              0
         data.animal.Exp2_12h_Input.bed
                              <integer>
     [1]                              1
     [2]                              0
     [3]                              1
     [4]                              0
     [5]                              0
     ...                            ...
  [4996]                              1
  [4997]                              0
  [4998]                              0
  [4999]                              0
  [5000]                              0
  -------
  seqinfo: 1 sequence from an unspecified genome; no seqlengths

[[2]]
GRanges object with 5000 ranges and 5 metadata columns:
         seqnames             ranges strand   |    Island
            <Rle>          <IRanges>  <Rle>   | <integer>
     [1]     chr1     [10000, 10001]      *   |         0
     [2]     chr1     [10050, 10051]      *   |         0
     [3]     chr1     [10100, 10101]      *   |         0
     [4]     chr1     [10150, 10151]      *   |         0
     [5]     chr1     [10200, 10201]      *   |         0
     ...      ...                ...    ... ...       ...
  [4996]     chr1 [1119900, 1119901]      *   |         0
  [4997]     chr1 [1120000, 1120001]      *   |         0
  [4998]     chr1 [1120100, 1120101]      *   |         0
  [4999]     chr1 [1120150, 1120151]      *   |         0
  [5000]     chr1 [1120200, 1120201]      *   |         0
         data.animal.Exp1_15h_PolII.bed data.animal.Exp2_15h_PolII.bed
                              <integer>                      <integer>
     [1]                              1                              0
     [2]                              0                              0
     [3]                              2                              0
     [4]                              1                              0
     [5]                              0                              0
     ...                            ...                            ...
  [4996]                              0                              0
  [4997]                              0                              0
  [4998]                              0                              0
  [4999]                              0                              0
  [5000]                              0                              0
         data.animal.Exp1_15h_Input.bed data.animal.Exp2_15h_Input.bed
                              <integer>                      <integer>
     [1]                              0                              2
     [2]                              1                              0
     [3]                              0                              1
     [4]                              0                              0
     [5]                              1                              1
     ...                            ...                            ...
  [4996]                              0                              1
  [4997]                              0                              1
  [4998]                              1                              0
  [4999]                              1                              0
  [5000]                              0                              1
  -------
  seqinfo: 1 sequence from an unspecified genome; no seqlengths

 

The real list will contain many more granges. Notice that there are several data columns in each file.

What I want is a GRanges object containing the union of all the ranges and the metadata. I could loop over the list, taking the union of each pair of GRanges, but the union loses the metadata.

Is there a way to merge all my GRanges into one giant GRanges, with metadata? (What I ultimately want is a dataframe of counts so that I can input it into limma.)

GenomicRanges • 18k views
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1
Entering edit mode

I am curious as to how you get this list of GRanges. Wouldn't it make sense to create an eSet or SummarizedExperiment for use with limma?

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0
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Ah, so if I have multiple granges (with different, somewhat overlapping rows) in a summarizedexperiment, limma can treat it like one matrix? Voom even? (I have very little bioconductor experience, unfortunately.)

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6
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@herve-pages-1542
Last seen 5 hours ago
Seattle, WA, United States

Hi,

Merge is a pretty vague term. My understanding is that you want to concatenate all the GRanges objects in the list. In the R world, this concatenation is performed with c().One complication here is that the arguments to your call to c() are in a list. So you need to use do.call("c", list_of_arguments):

l1 <- list(1:5, 21:22, 31:34)
do.call("c", l1)  # same as c(l1[[1]], l1[[2]], l1[[3]])
# [1]  1  2  3  4  5 21 22 31 32 33 34

So with your list of GRanges objects do.call("c", l3) should do what you want.

H.

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0
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Thanks. What I want to do is create a new granges object. If it is a concat, it is a horizontal concat. The new granges should have n * 4 metadata columns, where n is the number of granges, 4 is the number of metadata columns in each original grange.

So if I have two granges

a:

chr1 100 101 5 6

chr 200 201 7 8 

and b:

chr 150 151 0 1

chr 200 201 1 1 

I want to create a new granges object like this (a + b):

chr1 100 101 5 6 0 0

chr  150 151 0 0 0 1

chr 200 201 7 8 1 1

This should preferably work for an arbitrary number of granges objects. Perhaps this is not possible? Sorry for being unclear in my original q.

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1
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I am working on a merge() method now. It is only a binary merge but it should do the trick with Reduce().

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3
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Ok, added in S4Vectors 0.11.7, Reduce(merge, l3) should work. NAs are filled into the missing cells, so if you want those as zeros, you will need to convert them explicitly.

 

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0
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do.call method did not work for me (the result remained a list), however, the following from "GRangesList-class {GenomicRanges}"  R documentation did:

"unlist(x, recursive = TRUE, use.names = TRUE): Concatenates the elements of x into a single GRanges object."

I'm still looking for a method to produce a union of all lines in the resulting GRanges object (so I end up with fewer but larger intervals), preferably without looping.

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0
Entering edit mode

Concatenating two lists results in a list, so I guess you're seeing the expected behavior. Probably you want to provide a reproducible example of the data you are starting with (minimal, just a few lines to create an artificial data object...) and some explicit indication of what you want at the end.

?"relist,ANY,PartitioningByEnd-method" mentions relist() (typically used as unlist, transform, relist for 'vectorized' operations on ranges rather than iterative operation on elements of a list) and regroup() (form into new skeleton without intermediate operation). 'union' might be the within-GRanges operation 'reduce()' ?

 

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5
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merv ▴ 120
@mmfansler-13248
Last seen 5 months ago
MSKCC | New York, NY

I suspect this may have changed, but with Bioconductor 3.12 packages, I can do

unlist(as(l3, "GRangesList"))

which converts the base list object to a GRangesList and then uses the GRL-specific unlist to merge to single GRanges object.

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1
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This was the only solution that worked for me, thanks! But don't forget closing parentheses :P

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