Create BED file from list with gene symbols

Question

Is there a way to generate a BED file of a list of gene symbols for a given genome?

Answer 1

Via Gencode and BEDOPS convert2bed:

$ wget -qO- ftp://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/gencode/Gencode_human/release_28/gencode.v28.annotation.gff3.gz \
    | gunzip --stdout - \
    | awk '$3 == "gene"' - \
    | convert2bed -i gff - \
    > genes.bed

Replace the FTP path with that needed for your genome of interest. Feel free to edit your question if you need help with that, by specifying your given genome.

You can modify the awk statement to get exons, by replacing gene with exon.

BEDOPS: https://github.com/bedops/bedops

Once you have the genes in BED format, you can grep the file for them, using a text file of matches:

$ grep -Fwf genes_of_interest.txt genes.bed > genes_of_interest.bed

Answer 2

You could also get your genes from UCSC. Here's how: