Hello,

I have a list of several base pair locations (each have a start and end base pair). Eg: Chr:17,  BasePair1: 26804211 , BasePair2: 26818676

And I am looking to find all possible annotations including gene name, known SNPs , microRNA etc between these two base pair locations (the region need not be in the exonic region, it can be any region in the genome) 

I'm trying to sort of get a comprehensive understanding of the region from the annotation.

I can create a GRanges object with my input, and can start with the "TxDb.Hsapiens.UCSC.hg19.knownGene" to get gene names.

Can anyone suggest similar packages for me to get any other annotation information ?

Thanks, K

You could try using the biomaRt package to query the various ensembl databases.

For example, to find genes in a region, and their GC content, you can do something like this:

library(biomaRt)
genes_mart <- useMart(biomart="ensembl", dataset="hsapiens_gene_ensembl")
getBM(mart = mart,
      attributes = c('ensembl_gene_id', 'percentage_gc_content'),
      filters = c('chromosomal_region'),
      values = "17:26804211-26818676")

To retrieve SNP information on a region, you have to query a different dataset, but it would be something like this:

snp_mart = useMart(biomart = "ENSEMBL_MART_SNP", dataset="hsapiens_snp",
                  host = "asia.ensembl.org")
getBM(mart = snp_mart,
      attributes = c('refsnp_id', 'allele'),
      filters = c('chromosomal_region'),
      values = "17:26804211-26818676")

Your example region appears to be in the centromere of chromosome 17, so I wouldn't expect to find much annotation there, but if that happens to be an unfortunate example this approach might be useful for other regions.  I would recommend reading the biomaRt vignette here to get a better idea of what you can do with the package, and looking at the listAttributes() function to understand what information is available for a particular data set.

Thank you ! This is helpful -  I will start with Biomart. That's a good start.