Wonderful. Is ncbiRefSeq also a database somewhere?
I have the following data:
Chromosome Start End XS XE TranscriptID GeneID Strand
36945 chr19 54754594 54756329 b'54754594,54756005,54756286,' b'54755063,54756202,54756329,' NR_110738 LOC101928804 -
36948 chr19 54769421 54771064 b'54769421,54770669,54771021,' b'54769891,54770937,54771064,' NR_110737 LOC101928804 -
36949 chr19 54769421 54771064 b'54769421,54770740,54771021,' b'54769891,54770937,54771064,' NR_110738 LOC101928804 -
36951 chr19 54785868 54835292 b'54785868,54816103,54834899,54835251,' b'54785899,54816541,54835167,54835292,' NR_110737 LOC101928804 -
36952 chr19 54785868 54835292 b'54785868,54816103,54834970,54835251,' b'54785899,54816541,54835167,54835292,' NR_110738 LOC101928804 -
Here you see transcripts from the same gene. Start is txStart and End is txEnd. For this gene (LOC101928804), can I say that the length of the gene is from 54754594 to 54835292 (from the start of first transcript to the end of last transcript). Or is this an oversimplification in some way?
1 answer
In most all cases what you are describing should work to find the start/end of the gene. The way we build the refGene track is to BLAT all the NCBI sequences ourselves, though we also offer a track with all the NCBI provided alignmend: ncbiRefSeq. All of the NR_* accession numbers are experimentally validated sequences. the txStart is equal to the first position of exonStarts and txEnd equals the final exonEnds.
You can query these from our public MySQL server:
$mysql -h genome-mysql.soe.ucsc.edu -ugenome -Ee "select * from refGene where name2 like 'LOC101928804' and chrom not like '%alt'" hg38
*************************** 1. row ***************************
bin: 1002
name: NR_110738
chrom: chr19
strand: -
txStart: 54754594
txEnd: 54756329
cdsStart: 54756329
cdsEnd: 54756329
exonCount: 3
exonStarts: 54754594,54756005,54756286,
exonEnds: 54755063,54756202,54756329,
score: 0
name2: LOC101928804
cdsStartStat: unk
cdsEndStat: unk
exonFrames: -1,-1,-1,
And also pull out just the txStart and txEnd which may save you some time:
$mysql -h genome-mysql.soe.ucsc.edu -ugenome -e "select name,txStart,txEnd from refGene where name2 like 'LOC101928804' and chrom not like '%alt'" hg38
+-----------+----------+----------+
| name | txStart | txEnd |
+-----------+----------+----------+
| NR_110738 | 54754594 | 54756329 |
| NR_110737 | 54769421 | 54771064 |
| NR_110738 | 54769421 | 54771064 |
| NR_110737 | 54785868 | 54835292 |
| NR_110738 | 54785868 | 54835292 |
+-----------+----------+----------+
You can also pull out the selected info via point and click using http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTables.
Lou UCSC GB
You can find all all the hg38 annotations including the ncbiRefSeq in our downloads directory:
You can also do a MySQL query same as above, but instead of querying the refGene table, you can query ncbiRefSeq:
$mysql -h genome-mysql.soe.ucsc.edu -ugenome -e "select name,txStart,txEnd from ncbiRefSeq where name2 like 'LOC101928804' and chrom not like '%alt'" hg38
+-------------+----------+----------+
| name | txStart | txEnd |
+-------------+----------+----------+
| NR_110737.1 | 54769421 | 54771064 |
| NR_110738.1 | 54769421 | 54771064 |
+-------------+----------+----------+
You can look at the track description page for all the different NCBI tracks and a description of what they contain: http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTrackUi?db=hg38&g=refSeqComposite
The only track we 'generate' ourselves is the UCSC RefSeq (the table is named RefGene) which is described as follows:
UCSC RefSeq – annotations generated from UCSC's realignment of RNAs with NM and NR accessions to the human genome. This track was previously known as the "RefSeq Genes" track.
It is worth mentioning, however, that almost all the alignments match the same location NCBI reports. Nearly 100%. The few differences are due to us using BLAT with certain parameters, while they BLAST their sequences (I believe).
Dear Nassar,
I happen to notice that in some cases, the cdsStart equals to the cdsEnd..... Why is that happening?
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I'll not do that. If all your transcripts get an exon skipping in 3' or 5' you'll miss some information. What you can do is use BiomaRt with your
GeneIDto get the gene position from Ensembl annotationThanks. Do you know if refgene has some gene start and end info? But perhaps that is a question for another thread.
ftp://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/refseq/H_sapiens/annotation/GRCh38_latest/refseq_identifiers/GRCh38_latest_genomic.gff.gz
Gene name information is under
gene=If this is the exon skipping you speak of I do not see why it should matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exon_skipping
UCSC refgene probably does not include such mistakes, no?
How did you get this from RefGene ?
These are not mistakes, just different types of transcript