Retrieve detailed gene descriptions Given a list of gene IDs, how do you retrieve the gene description, summary and other detailed information in R?
Description of how to use biomaRt here. Filter by your list of gene IDs. Get the descriptions etc as attributes. Eg:

&gt; library(biomaRt)
&gt; ensembl = useEnsembl(biomart="ensembl", dataset="hsapiens_gene_ensembl")
&gt; IDs &lt;- c("BRCA2","BRAF")
genedesc &lt;- getBM(attributes=c('external_gene_name','description'), filters = 'external_gene_name', values = IDs, mart =ensembl)
&gt; genedesc
  external_gene_name                                                                      description
1               BRAF B-Raf proto-oncogene, serine/threonine kinase [Source:HGNC Symbol;Acc:HGNC:1097]
2              BRCA2                  BRCA2, DNA repair associated [Source:HGNC Symbol;Acc:HGNC:1101]