I've only recently adopted GRanges for problems like the one below; my apologies in advance if this or similar questions have been answered many times already (I couldn't find anything in various searches...)
I have a GRanges structure like the one below. Using values in the metadata column X, I'd like to collapse `seqnames` and `ranges` information, such that, for all genomic ranges (really, positions) in this table, a new GRanges structure is generated where the `ranges` value starts with the first position and ends with the last position for all original ranges falling under a single bin in the metadata column. For example, referring to the table below, for X == 1, the new GRanges table that I wish to generate should have a single entry with `seqnames` = 16 and ranges = [60299, 60370].
I can think of various ways to do this with data.frame, but I'd rather avoid the inefficiency of doing that then coercing the resultant structure back to GRanges. Is there an efficient way to do this?
GRanges object with 1507062 ranges and 1 metadata column:
seqnames ranges strand | X
<Rle> <IRanges> <Rle> | <numeric>
[1] 16 [60299, 60299] * | 1
[2] 16 [60304, 60304] * | 1
[3] 16 [60336, 60336] * | 1
[4] 16 [60370, 60370] * | 1
[5] 16 [61024, 61024] * | 2
... ... ... ... . ...
[1507058] MT [16412, 16412] * | 240330
[1507059] MT [16428, 16428] * | 240330
[1507060] MT [16450, 16450] * | 240330
[1507061] MT [16495, 16495] * | 240330
[1507062] MT [16542, 16542] * | 240330
-------
seqinfo: 84 sequences from an unspecified genome; no seqlengths
