Tuesday, January 17, 2012

Annotating limma Results with Gene Names for Affy Microarrays

Lately I've been using the limma package often for analyzing microarray data. When I read in Affy CEL files using ReadAffy(), the resulting ExpressionSet won't contain any featureData annotation. Consequentially, when I run topTable to get a list of differentially expressed genes, there's no annotation information other than the Affymetrix probeset IDs or transcript cluster IDs. There are other ways of annotating these results (INNER JOIN to a MySQL database, biomaRt, etc), but I would like to have the output from topTable already annotated with gene information. Ideally, I could annotate each probeset ID with a gene symbol, gene name, Ensembl ID, and have that Ensembl ID hyperlink out to the Ensembl genome browser. With some help from Gordon Smyth on the Bioconductor Mailing list, I found that annotating the ExpressionSet object results in the output from topTable also being annotated.

The results from topTable are pretty uninformative without annotation:


After annotation:


You can generate an HTML file with clickable links to the Ensembl Genome Browser for each gene:


Here's the R code to do it:

8 comments:

  1. How about package affycoretools? Gives detailed html results with common annotations you want, up, down genes, fold changes, stats etc. corresponding to venn diagrams from limma..quite straightforward

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  2. affycoretools definitely sounds useful - will give it a go! Thanks.

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  3. Thanks for the script! I modified it to work with the Drosophila genome with Flybase links instead of Ensemble and it worked perfectly

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  4. Hi It looks like the R code link is broken now.

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    Replies
    1. Last line: Here's the R code to do it:
      Where is the R code? I thought you had a gist for it, and the link for the gist is gone?

      Delete

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Getting Genetics Done by Stephen Turner is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.