lmer Error in eval(predvars, data, env) : object x not found - r

Question

Applying lmer() function across all columns in dataframe. I have made a list of variables and used lapply. Below is the code:
varlist=names(Genus_abundance)[5:ncol(Genus_abundance)]
lapply(varlist, function(x){lmer(substitute(i ~ Status + (1|Match), list(i=as.name(x), data=Genus_abundance, na.action = na.exclude)))})
However, I keep getting this error:
Error in eval(predvars, data, env) : object 'Acetatifactor' not found
I have checked and Acetatifactor is in the Genus_abundance dataframe.
Bit stuck about where its going wrong
EDIT:
Added a working example:
set.seed(43)
n <- 6
dat <- data.frame(id=1:n, Status=rep(LETTERS[1:2], n/2), age= sample(18:90, n, replace=TRUE), match=1:n, Acetatifactor=runif(n), Acutalibacter=runif(n), Adlercreutzia=runif(n))
head(dat)
id Status age match Acetatifactor Acutalibacter Adlercreutzia
1 1 A 49 1 0.1861022 0.1364904 0.8626298
2 2 B 31 2 0.7297301 0.8246794 0.3169752
3 3 A 23 3 0.4118721 0.5923042 0.2592606
4 4 B 64 4 0.4140497 0.7943970 0.7422665
5 5 A 60 5 0.4803101 0.7690324 0.7473611
6 6 B 79 6 0.4274945 0.9180564 0.9179040

Answer 1

lapply(varlist,
function(x){lmer(substitute(i ~ status + (1|match), list(i=as.name(x))),
data=dd)
})
The specific problem here is misplaced parentheses. You should close the substitute(..., list(i=as.name(x))) with three close-parentheses so that the whole chunk is properly understood as the first argument to lme4.
More generally I agree with #Kat in the comments that this is a good place to look. Since your arguments are already strings (not symbols) you don't really need all of the substitute() business and could use
fit_fun <- function(v) {
lmer(reformulate(c("status", "(1|match)"), response = v),
data = dd, na.action = na.exclude)
}
lapply(varlist, fit_fun)
Or you could use refit to fit the first column, then update the fit with each of the next columns. For large models this is much more efficient.
m1 <- lmer(resp1 ~ status + (1|match), ...)
m_other <- lapply(dd[-(1:3)], refit, object = m1)
c(list(m1), m_other)