Adding bed/wig data to dalliance genome browser

I have been playing a bit with the dalliance genome browser. It is quite useful and I have started using it to generate links to send to researchers to show regions of interest we find from bioinformatics analyses.
I added a document to my github repo describing how to display a bed file in the browser. That rst is here and displayed in inline below.
It uses the UCSC binaries for creating BigWig/BigBed files because dalliance can request a subset of the data without downloading the entire file given the correct apache configuration (also described below).
This will require a recent version of dalliance because there was a bug in the BigBed parsing until recently.

Dalliance Data Tutorial

dalliance is a web-based scrolling genome-browser. It can display data from
remote DAS servers or local or remote BigWig or BigBed files.
This will cover how to set up an html page that links to remote DAS services.
It will also show how to create and serve BigWig and BigBed files.

Note

This document will be using hg18 for this tutorial, but it is applicable to
any version available from your favorite database or DAS .

Creating A BigBed

Getting a bed file from UCSC

• From the UCSC table browser choose

  • genome: Human
  • assembly: NCBI36/hg18
  • group: Genes and Gene Prediction Tracks
  • track: UCSC Genes
  • table: knownGene
  • output format "selected fileds from primary and related tables"
  • in text box, name it "knownGene.hg18.stuff.txt"
  • click "get output"
  • check kgXref under 'Linked Tables'
  • click 'Allow Selection From Checked Tables' at bottom of page.
  • check 'geneSymbol' from hg18.kgXref fields section
  • click 'get output' and a file named 'knownGene.hg18.stuff.txt' will be saved to your downloads directory. move it to your current directory.

• To get this into bed format copy and paste this onto the command-line:

  grep -v '#' knownGene.hg18.stuff.txt | awk 'BEGIN { OFS = "\t"; } ;
  {   split($9, astarts, /,/);
      split($10, aends, /,/);
      starts=""
      ends=""
      for(i in astarts){
          if (! astarts[i]) continue
          ends=ends(aends[i] - astarts[i])","
          starts=starts(astarts[i] = astarts[i] - $4)","
      }
      print $2,$4,$5,$1","toupper($13),1,$3,$6,$5,".",$8,ends,starts
  }' | sort -k1,1 -k2,2n > knownGene.hg18.bed
  

• To create a BigBed from this, do (note if you're not on a 64 bit
  machine, you'll have to find the 32bit binaries:

  wget http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/admin/exe/linux.x86_64/fetchChromSizes
  wget http://hgdownload.cse.ucsc.edu/admin/exe/linux.x86_64/bedToBigBed
  chmod +x fetchChromSizes bedToBigBed
  ./fetchChromSizes hg18 > data/hg18.chrom.sizes
  ./bedToBigBed knownGene.hg18.bed data/hg18.chrom.sizes knownGene.hg18.bb
  

now knownGene.hg18.bb is a BigBed file containing both the UCSC and the common
name in the name column.

SQL

UCSC also has a public mysql server so the process of downloading to a bed can be simplified to:

mysql --user=genome --host=genome-mysql.cse.ucsc.edu -A -D hg18 -P 3306   -e "select chrom,txStart,txEnd,K.name,X.geneSymbol,strand,exonStarts,exonEnds from knownGene as K,kgXref as X where  X.kgId=K.name;" > tmp.notbed
grep -v txStart tmp.notbed | awk 'BEGIN { OFS = "\t"; } ;
    {   split($7, astarts, /,/);
        split($8, aends, /,/);
        starts=""
        sizes=""
        exonCount=0
        for(i in astarts){
            if (! astarts[i]) continue
            sizes=sizes""(aends[i] - astarts[i])","
            starts=starts""(astarts[i] = astarts[i] - $2)","
            exonCount=exonCount + 1
        }
        print $1,$2,$3,$4","$5,1,$6,$2,$3,".",exonCount,sizes,starts
    }' | sort -k1,1 -k2,2n > knownGene.hg18.bed

then proceed as the last steps above to create the big bed file.

Displaying A BigBed in Dalliance

From there, download dalliance:

$ git://github.com/dasmoth/dalliance.git
cd dalliance

and edit test.html, adding:

{name: 'UCSC Genes',
 bwgURI:               '/dalliance/knownGene.hg18.bb',
},

before the line that looks like:

{name: 'Repeats',

at around line 55.

Then edit your apache.conf (e.g. /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default)
and put the following
(here i assume you cloned dalliance into /usr/usr/local/src/dalliance-git):

Alias /dalliance "/usr/local/src/dalliance-git"
<Directory "/usr/locals/src/dalliance-git">
 
    Header set Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*"
    Header set Access-Control-Allow-Headers "Range"
 
    Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride None
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Then enable mod-headers apache module. On Ubuntu, that looks like:

sudo a2enmod headers

Then point your browser to:: http://yourhost/dalliance/test.html
And you should see the your 'UCSC Genes' track in full glory along
with the other niceties of the dalliance browser.