bold (version 1.3.0)

bold_seq: Search BOLD for sequences.

Description

Get sequences for a taxonomic name, id, bin, container, institution, researcher, geographic, place, or gene.

Usage

bold_seq(
  taxon = NULL,
  ids = NULL,
  bin = NULL,
  container = NULL,
  institutions = NULL,
  researchers = NULL,
  geo = NULL,
  marker = NULL,
  response = FALSE,
  ...
)

Value

A data frame with each element as row and 5 columns for processid, identification, marker, accession, and sequence.

Arguments

taxon

(character) One or more taxonomic name. Optional.

ids

(character|integer|numeric) One or more IDs. Optional. IDs include Sample IDs, Process IDs, Museum IDs and Field IDs.

bin

(character) One or more Barcode Index Number URI. Optional.

container

(character) One or more project codes or dataset codes. Optional.

institutions

(character) One or more institution's name. Optional. Institutions are the Specimen Storing Site.

researchers

(character) One or more researcher names. Optional. Include collectors and specimen identifiers.

geo

(character) One or more geographic sites. Includes countries and province/states.

marker

(character) Returns all records containing matching marker codes.

response

(logical) Default : FALSE. If TRUE, returns the object from the Curl call. Useful for debugging and getting more detailed info on the API call.

...

Further args passed on to crul::verb-GET, main purpose being curl debugging

Large requests

Some requests can lead to errors. These often have to do with requesting data for a rank that is quite high in the tree, such as an Order, for example, Coleoptera. If your request is taking a long time, it's likely that something will go wrong on the BOLD server side, or we'll not be able to parse the result here in R because R can only process strings of a certain length. bold users have reported errors in which the resulting response from BOLD is so large that we could not parse it.

A good strategy for when you want data for a high rank is to do many separate requests for lower ranks within your target rank. You can do this manually, or use the function taxize::downstream to get all the names of a lower rank within a target rank. There's an example in the README (https://docs.ropensci.org/bold/#large-data)

If a request times out

This is likely because you're request was for a large number of sequences and the BOLD service timed out. You still should get some output, those sequences that were retrieved before the time out happened. As above, see the README (https://docs.ropensci.org/bold/#large-data) for an example of dealing with large data problems with this function.

Marker

Notes from BOLD on the marker param: "All markers for a specimen matching the search string will be returned. ie. A record with COI-5P and ITS will return sequence data for both markers even if only COI-5P was specified."

You will likely end up with data with markers that you did not request - just be sure to filter those out as needed.

References

http://v4.boldsystems.org/index.php/resources/api?type=webservices

Examples

if (FALSE) {
bold_seq(taxon='Coelioxys')
bold_seq(taxon='Aglae')
bold_seq(taxon=c('Coelioxys','Osmia'))
bold_seq(ids='ACRJP618-11')
bold_seq(ids=c('ACRJP618-11','ACRJP619-11'))
bold_seq(bin='BOLD:AAA5125')
bold_seq(container='ACRJP')
bold_seq(researchers='Thibaud Decaens')
bold_seq(geo='Ireland')
bold_seq(geo=c('Ireland','Denmark'))

# Return the http response object for detailed Curl call response details
res <- bold_seq(taxon='Coelioxys', response=TRUE)
res$url
res$status_code
res$response_headers

## curl debugging
### You can do many things, including get verbose output on the curl
### call, and set a timeout
bold_seq(taxon='Coelioxys', verbose = TRUE)[1:2]
}