[BioC] org.*.eg.db problem

[Vincent Carey]

I don't think this question is extremely clear, but you could probably
get around your concern by using get() while pasting the
organism-identifying token into some string template

get(paste("org.", [token1], ".eg", [token2], sep=""))

will retrieve a map for organism identified by token1 with targets of
type identified by token2 -- examples are "Mm", "CHRLOC" for these
tokens respectively

there are undoubtedly more elegant ways to proceed, depending on your
specific concern

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 11:48 AM,  <arne.mueller at novartis.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> the org.*.eg.db environments cannot be used in a generic way :-( . Let's
> say I'm writing a function that needs an entire org.*.eg.db environment as
> argument, and the function doesn't care whether it's human, mouse rat or
> jellyfish. Inside my function I'd be required accessing the maps (e.g. for
> chromosomal location) without knowing the species. The problem is that you
> do need to know the species because the mapping names use the species
> abbreviation:
>
>> org.Mm.egCHRLOC
> CHRLOC map for Mouse (object of class "AnnDbMap")
>
> Why isn't this more generic so that one could just call egCHRLOC instead
> of org.Mm.egCHRLOC which makes code that uses this annotation having to
> know about the organism - why does it have to be be hard coded? Ideally
> I'd like to be able to do the following:
>
>> library(org.Mm.eg.db)
>> myGenomeAnnotationFunction(org.Mm.eg.db)  { # pass in as an environment?
>      # use the annotation environment to extract whatever information ...
> }
>
> How would you solve this when having to work with several species (if else
> ... ???)
>
>  thanks a lot for your help,
>
>  Arne
>
>
>
>
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>
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