This function returns the current 'ChipInfo' annotation object, containing chromosome,
id, position, strand, 'rs' id, allele 1, allele 2 for each SNP of a microarray chip,
in either hg18 or hg19 (build 36/37) coordinates. Can also be used to update the
current object to a new object.
This package makes extensive use of this class of annotation object for the working
microarray chip, e.g, default is ImmunoChip, but Metabochip is also built-in,
and you can also load your own annotation if using a different chip. The class
of the object used is 'ChipInfo' which is a GRanges object, modified to always
have columns for A1, A2 (alleles), rs.id, and a quality control flag. The
default display is tidier than GRanges, it has nice coersion to and frame data.frame
and indexing by chromosome using [[n]] has been added, in addition to normal [i,j]
indexing native to GRanges. A1 and A2 values are usually specific to each dataset
so for immunochip you may need to manually update these values to reflect
the allele coding in your own dataset.