DASiR: Distributed Annotation System in R
Distributed Annotation System (DAS) is a protocol for information exchange between a server and a client. Is widely used in bioinformatics and the most important repositories include a DAS server parallel to their main front-end. Few examples are UCSC, Ensembl or UniProt.
The DASiR package provides a convenient R-DAS interface to programmatically access DAS servers available from your network. It supports the main features of DAS 1.6 protocol providing a convenient interface to R users to a huge amount of biological information. DAS uses XML and HTTP protocols, so the server deployment and client requirements are signicantly less than MySQL or BioMart based alternatives. You can nd an browsable list with more than 1500 on-line DAS servers in the url http://www.dasregistry.org.
Despite the DAS protocol supports querying dierent kinds of data, DASiR has been designed with ranges-features in mind. Querying genomic sequences and protein structures is also supported, but you probably will nd better ways to access such data in R if you requiere an intensive use of them (Biostrings genomes or Bio3dD package for PDB structure, for example).