Dear ensembldb maintainers,

First, thanks a lot for this great resource!

I have a question regarding the "gene description" field. It seems to me that it is not accessible from ensembldb, at least I couldn't find it in the available "columns"... For example, for the gene "Cntnap1" I would like to retrieve the following field: "contactin associated protein-like 1 [Source:MGI Symbol;Acc:MGI:1858201]" (see http://www.ensembl.org/Mus_musculus/Gene/Summary?db=core;g=ENSMUSG00000017167)

Below is what I tried, am I missing something?

library(AnnotationHub)
ah <- AnnotationHub()
ahDb <- query(ah, "Ensembl 88 EnsDb for Mus musculus")
edb <- ahDb[[1]]
columns(edb)

[1] "ENTREZID"            "EXONID"              "EXONIDX"             "EXONSEQEND"          "EXONSEQSTART"        "GENEBIOTYPE"       
[7] "GENEID"              "GENENAME"            "GENESEQEND"          "GENESEQSTART"        "INTERPROACCESSION"   "ISCIRCULAR"        
[13] "PROTDOMEND"          "PROTDOMSTART"        "PROTEINDOMAINID"     "PROTEINDOMAINSOURCE" "PROTEINID"           "PROTEINSEQUENCE"   
[19] "SEQCOORDSYSTEM"      "SEQLENGTH"           "SEQNAME"             "SEQSTRAND"           "SYMBOL"              "TXBIOTYPE"         
[25] "TXCDSSEQEND"         "TXCDSSEQSTART"       "TXID"                "TXNAME"              "TXSEQEND"            "TXSEQSTART"        
[31] "UNIPROTDB"           "UNIPROTID"           "UNIPROTMAPPINGTYPE"

Here is my sessionInfo()
R version 3.4.0 (2017-04-21)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin15.6.0 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Sierra 10.12.5

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.4/Resources/lib/libRblas.0.dylib
LAPACK: /Library/Frameworks/R.framework/Versions/3.4/Resources/lib/libRlapack.dylib

locale:
[1] C

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

other attached packages:
[1] AnnotationHub_2.8.1 BiocGenerics_0.22.0

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] Rcpp_0.12.11                  IRanges_2.10.2              
[3] digest_0.6.12                 mime_0.5                    
[5] R6_2.2.1                      xtable_1.8-2                
[7] DBI_0.6-1                     stats4_3.4.0                
[9] RSQLite_1.1-2                 BiocInstaller_1.26.0        
[11] httr_1.2.1                    S4Vectors_0.14.2            
[13] Biobase_2.36.2                shiny_1.0.3                 
[15] httpuv_1.3.3                  yaml_2.1.14                 
[17] compiler_3.4.0                AnnotationDbi_1.38.0        
[19] memoise_1.1.0                 htmltools_0.3.6             
[21] interactiveDisplayBase_1.14.0

OK, it's now available for Ensembl 87 (still working on the Ensembl 88) that you can get from AnnotationHub:

> library(AnnotationHub)
> ah <- AnnotationHub()
> edb <- query(ah, "EnsDb.Hsapiens.v87")
> edb
EnsDb for Ensembl:
|Backend: SQLite
|Db type: EnsDb
|Type of Gene ID: Ensembl Gene ID
|Supporting package: ensembldb
|Db created by: ensembldb package from Bioconductor
|script_version: 0.3.1
|Creation time: Thu Jun  8 07:27:44 2017
|ensembl_version: 87
|ensembl_host: localhost
|Organism: homo_sapiens
|taxonomy_id: 9606
|genome_build: GRCh38
|DBSCHEMAVERSION: 2.1
| No. of genes: 63970.
| No. of transcripts: 216741.
|Protein data available.

> genes(edb, columns = c("gene_id", "description"), return.type = "DataFrame")
DataFrame with 63970 rows and 2 columns
              gene_id
          <character>
1     ENSG00000000003
2     ENSG00000000005
3     ENSG00000000419
...               ...
63968          LRG_98
63969          LRG_99
63970         LRG_992
                                                                                         description
                                                                                         <character>
1                                                  tetraspanin 6 [Source:HGNC Symbol;Acc:HGNC:11858]
2                                                    tenomodulin [Source:HGNC Symbol;Acc:HGNC:17757]
3     dolichyl-phosphate mannosyltransferase subunit 1, catalytic [Source:HGNC Symbol;Acc:HGNC:3005]
...                                                                                              ...
63968                                  recombination activating 1 [Source:HGNC Symbol;Acc:HGNC:9831]
63969                                  recombination activating 2 [Source:HGNC Symbol;Acc:HGNC:9832]
63970                                         estrogen receptor 1 [Source:HGNC Symbol;Acc:HGNC:3467]

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.4.0 (2017-04-21)
Platform: x86_64-apple-darwin16.6.0/x86_64 (64-bit)
Running under: macOS Sierra 10.12.6

Matrix products: default
BLAS: /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libBLAS.dylib
LAPACK: /System/Library/Frameworks/Accelerate.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/vecLib.framework/Versions/A/libLAPACK.dylib

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

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

other attached packages:
 [1] ensembldb_2.0.3        AnnotationFilter_1.0.0 GenomicFeatures_1.28.2
 [4] AnnotationDbi_1.38.1   Biobase_2.36.2         GenomicRanges_1.28.3  
 [7] GenomeInfoDb_1.12.1    IRanges_2.10.2         S4Vectors_0.14.3      
[10] AnnotationHub_2.8.1    BiocGenerics_0.22.0   

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] Rcpp_0.12.11                  BiocInstaller_1.26.0         
 [3] compiler_3.4.0                XVector_0.16.0               
 [5] ProtGenerics_1.8.0            bitops_1.0-6                 
 [7] tools_3.4.0                   zlibbioc_1.22.0              
 [9] biomaRt_2.32.0                digest_0.6.12                
[11] lattice_0.20-35               RSQLite_1.1-2                
[13] memoise_1.1.0                 Matrix_1.2-10                
[15] DelayedArray_0.2.7            shiny_1.0.3                  
[17] DBI_0.6-1                     curl_2.6                     
[19] yaml_2.1.14                   GenomeInfoDbData_0.99.0      
[21] rtracklayer_1.36.3            httr_1.2.1                   
[23] Biostrings_2.44.1             grid_3.4.0                   
[25] R6_2.2.1                      XML_3.98-1.7                 
[27] BiocParallel_1.10.1           matrixStats_0.52.2           
[29] Rsamtools_1.28.0              htmltools_0.3.6              
[31] GenomicAlignments_1.12.1      SummarizedExperiment_1.6.3   
[33] mime_0.5                      interactiveDisplayBase_1.14.0
[35] xtable_1.8-2                  httpuv_1.3.3                 
[37] lazyeval_0.2.0                RCurl_1.95-4.8

So, EnsDb databases with a DBSCHEMAVERSION >= 2.1 contain now also gene descriptions.

hope this helps.

Dear Julien,

you're right - gene descriptions are not (yet) in the database. I opened an issue https://github.com/jotsetung/ensembldb/issues/49 , so there is chance I will add that in not too far future.

cheers, jo

Great, thanks for the quick answer!