The alabaster.ranges
package implements methods to save genomic ranges (i.e.,
GRanges
and GRangesList
objects) to file
artifacts and load them back into R. It also supports various
CompressedList
subclasses, including the somewhat useful
CompressedSplitDataFrameList
. Check out alabaster.base
for more details on the motivation and concepts of the
alabaster framework.
Given some genomic ranges, we can use saveObject()
to
save it inside a staging directory:
library(GenomicRanges)
gr <- GRanges("chrA", IRanges(sample(100), width=sample(100)))
mcols(gr)$score <- runif(length(gr))
metadata(gr)$genome <- "Aaron"
seqlengths(gr) <- c(chrA=1000)
library(alabaster.ranges)
tmp <- tempfile()
saveObject(gr, tmp)
list.files(tmp, recursive=TRUE)
## [1] "OBJECT"
## [2] "other_annotations/OBJECT"
## [3] "other_annotations/list_contents.json.gz"
## [4] "range_annotations/OBJECT"
## [5] "range_annotations/basic_columns.h5"
## [6] "ranges.h5"
## [7] "sequence_information/OBJECT"
## [8] "sequence_information/info.h5"
We can then easily load it back in with
readObject()
.
## GRanges object with 100 ranges and 1 metadata column:
## seqnames ranges strand | score
## <Rle> <IRanges> <Rle> | <numeric>
## [1] chrA 24-28 * | 0.103426
## [2] chrA 61-122 * | 0.859813
## [3] chrA 16-31 * | 0.306949
## [4] chrA 27-123 * | 0.433923
## [5] chrA 92-177 * | 0.421361
## ... ... ... ... . ...
## [96] chrA 67-157 * | 0.245809
## [97] chrA 13-20 * | 0.240226
## [98] chrA 11-70 * | 0.596118
## [99] chrA 26-119 * | 0.996587
## [100] chrA 62-113 * | 0.999997
## -------
## seqinfo: 1 sequence from an unspecified genome
The same can be done for GRangesList
and
CompressedList
subclasses.
Metadata is preserved during this round-trip:
## $genome
## [1] "Aaron"
## DataFrame with 100 rows and 1 column
## score
## <numeric>
## 1 0.103426
## 2 0.859813
## 3 0.306949
## 4 0.433923
## 5 0.421361
## ... ...
## 96 0.245809
## 97 0.240226
## 98 0.596118
## 99 0.996587
## 100 0.999997
## Seqinfo object with 1 sequence from an unspecified genome:
## seqnames seqlengths isCircular genome
## chrA 1000 NA <NA>
## R version 4.4.2 (2024-10-31)
## Platform: x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
## Running under: Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
##
## Matrix products: default
## BLAS: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libblas.so.3
## LAPACK: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/openblas-pthread/libopenblasp-r0.3.26.so; LAPACK version 3.12.0
##
## locale:
## [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NUMERIC=C
## [3] LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8 LC_COLLATE=C
## [5] LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8
## [7] LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 LC_NAME=C
## [9] LC_ADDRESS=C LC_TELEPHONE=C
## [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
##
## time zone: Etc/UTC
## tzcode source: system (glibc)
##
## attached base packages:
## [1] stats4 stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods
## [8] base
##
## other attached packages:
## [1] alabaster.ranges_1.7.0 alabaster.base_1.7.0 GenomicRanges_1.59.0
## [4] GenomeInfoDb_1.43.0 IRanges_2.41.0 S4Vectors_0.45.0
## [7] BiocGenerics_0.53.1 generics_0.1.3 BiocStyle_2.35.0
##
## loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
## [1] httr_1.4.7 cli_3.6.3 knitr_1.48
## [4] rlang_1.1.4 xfun_0.49 UCSC.utils_1.3.0
## [7] jsonlite_1.8.9 buildtools_1.0.0 htmltools_0.5.8.1
## [10] maketools_1.3.1 sys_3.4.3 sass_0.4.9
## [13] rmarkdown_2.29 evaluate_1.0.1 jquerylib_0.1.4
## [16] fastmap_1.2.0 Rhdf5lib_1.29.0 alabaster.schemas_1.7.0
## [19] yaml_2.3.10 lifecycle_1.0.4 BiocManager_1.30.25
## [22] compiler_4.4.2 Rcpp_1.0.13-1 rhdf5filters_1.19.0
## [25] XVector_0.47.0 rhdf5_2.51.0 digest_0.6.37
## [28] R6_2.5.1 GenomeInfoDbData_1.2.13 bslib_0.8.0
## [31] tools_4.4.2 zlibbioc_1.52.0 cachem_1.1.0