[Genome] Finding nearest genes to a given genomic position

[Christoph Bock]

Hello,

given a list of genome positions, can the UCSC Genome Browser or Galaxy
retrieve me the nearest genes for each position in the list? 

More precisely, I have a custom track of genome positions in BED format
(e.g. chr20	23917669	23917670), and I would like to obtain the
RefSeq IDs of the closest gene both upstream and downstream, as well as
their distance from the given position.

I found a previous posting asking a similar question
(http://www.soe.ucsc.edu/pipermail/genome/2004-April/004533.html), but since
this dates back three years already and pre-dates the current Galaxy, I was
thinking that there may be a simple solution now. The "intersect" function
unfortunately cannot solve this question, for obvious reasons.

Thank you and best regards,
 Christoph

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  Christoph Bock
  Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik
  Department of Computational Biology
  Stuhlsatzenhausweg 85  /  66123 Saarbrücken  /  GERMANY
  Office (Room 522): +49-681-9325-322
  Fax: +49-681-9325-399
  http://www.christoph-bock.de
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