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high-level workflow example

Open gpertea opened this issue 2 years ago • 1 comments

Thank you for this excellent work - I have been looking for something like this for a while as I often needed to explore transcript assemblies within a gene or genomic region while comparing them with reference annotation etc.

I think it would be really useful for the community (and increase the popularity/adoption of the package) to provide a step-by-step workflow example (perhaps adding a few high-level convenience functions) for a use case like this:

  • loading a user provided GTF/GFF or BED file (e.g. with novel transcripts). As far as I know this can be done starting with something like as.data.frame(rtracklayer::import("user.gtf"))
  • loading reference annotation transcripts for the specified region of interest (or a gene?), from the available AnnotationDbi (orgdb) and txdb packages out there, or pulling such annotation directly from an online resource (biomaRt); in general
  • display the above with ggtranscript in a visually distinct manner (the reference transcripts using a different color from the user loaded transcripts, or otherwise suggesting/delimiting the two separate "tracks")

A genomic range would of course be required from the start (could be also used to subset the transcripts from the user provided file), with some common-sense checks (if not already implemented) to limit the genomic region width, the maximum number of transcripts etc.

gpertea avatar Feb 11 '22 16:02 gpertea

I'm super glad you find ggtranscript useful :)

Thanks for the detailed description - I completely agree, this workflow would be very helpful for users, will work on adding.

dzhang32 avatar Feb 12 '22 15:02 dzhang32