=head1 NAME  

gff2biomart.pl -- create tables for BioMart from genome GFF annotations

=head1 EXAMPLE BioMart : DroSpeGe

  BioMart : DroSpeGe  provides a tool for mining homologies and
annotations  of [twelve] Drosophila species genomes.
You can select genome regions with the available annotations, and
exclude others, and download tables or sequences of the  selection
set. For instance, select the regions with Mosquito gene homologs,
but no D. melanogaster gene homologs. Or select regions  with
gene predictions but no known homolog.
  DroSpeGe's BioMart is built with the GMOD Tool gff2biomart.pl
It converts most genome GFF annotations into a BioMart datamine.
Example data sets from this tool are at
  http://insects.eugenes.org/BioMart/martview

=head1 OUTPUTS 

  The script generates table .sql, .txt and .xml suited to BioMart 
(MySQL, BioMart version 0.3 tested).  It is a simple script without
special requirements, basically a data transformer that writes new
files formatted for a BioMart database.  Components created

1. chromosome region__main tables for biomart
   with chromosomes broken into Kb bins/regions (5Kb default)
   Features that overlap each region are tabulated.
   
2. per-feature feature__dm link tables
    store feature attributes (id,dbxref,match stats,..)
    add __main column feature_bool to indicate
    where features lie.

3. __chromosome__dm    
  with dna residues for fasta output 

4. main_biomart.xml and sequence_biomart.xml
   configurations for biomart usage.
   

=head1 IN BIOMART

-- filter (include,exclude) features that exist in regions,
including joint filters (has homology to human
but not to fly or worm genes; has predicted gene but 
not homology; any such feature type comparison).

-- output 4 kinds of attributes: a feature table, per-feature
sequence, region table, per-region sequence.
  
Please have installed and used BioMart before trying
to load the outputs of this.

=head1 VERSION

This is a alpha-level, not yet fully tested.  

=head1 WHERE

This will be part of a GMODTools release. Find the pre-release
script at http://eugenes.org/gmod/GMODTools/


=cut
