matchprobes {Biostrings} | R Documentation

## A function to match a query sequence to the sequences of a set of probes.

### Description

The `query` sequence, a character string (probably representing a transcript of interest), is scanned for the presence of exact matches to the sequences in the character vector `records`. The indices of the set of matches are returned.

The function is inefficient: it works on R's character vectors, and the actual matching algorithm is of time complexity `length(query)` times `length(records)`!

See `matchPattern`, `vmatchPattern` and `matchPDict` for more efficient sequence matching functions.

### Usage

    matchprobes(query, records, probepos=FALSE)

### Arguments

`query` | A character vector. For example, each element may represent a gene (transcript) of interest. See Details.
`records` | A character vector. For example, each element may represent the probes on a DNA array.
`probepos` | A logical value. If TRUE, return also the start positions of the matches in the query sequence.

### Details

`toupper` is applied to the arguments `query` and `records` before matching. The intention of this is to make the matching case-insensitive. The function is embarrassingly naive. The matching is done using the C library function `strstr`.

### Value

A list. Its first element is a list of the same length as the input vector. Each element of the list is a numeric vector containing the indices of the probes that have a perfect match in the query sequence.

If `probepos` is TRUE, the returned list has a second element: it is of the same shape as described above, and gives the respective positions of the matches.

### Author(s)

R. Gentleman, Laurent Gautier, Wolfgang Huber

### See Also

`matchPattern`, `vmatchPattern`, `matchPDict`

### Examples

      if(require("hgu95av2probe")){
        data("hgu95av2probe")
        seq <- hgu95av2probe$sequence[1:20]
        target <- paste(seq, collapse="")
        matchprobes(target, seq, probepos=TRUE)
      }

[Package Biostrings version 2.60.2 Index]