In recent years a wealth of biological data has become available in public
data repositories. Easy access to these valuable data resources and firm
integration with data analysis is needed for comprehensive bioinformatics data
analysis. biomaRt provides an interface to a growing collection of databases
implementing the BioMart software suite (http://www.biomart.org). The package
enables retrieval of large amounts of data in a uniform way without the need
to know the underlying database schemas or write complex SQL queries. Examples
of BioMart databases are Ensembl, COSMIC, Uniprot, HGNC, Gramene, Wormbase and
dbSNP mapped to Ensembl. These major databases give biomaRt users direct
access to a diverse set of data and enable a wide range of powerful online
queries from gene annotation to database mining.
