Gene Prospector

This abstract in BMC Bioinformatics was presented in our Computational Genetics Journal Club a few weeks back: "Gene Prospector: An evidence gateway for evaluating potential susceptibility genes and interacting risk factors for human diseases."

As described by the authors at CDC, Gene Prospector is a bioinformatics tool designed to sort, rank, and display information about genes in relation to human diseases, risk factors and other phenotypes.

While there seem to be several tools like this out there, this one was truly pleasant to use. A quick search for "Alzheimer" turned up some very familiar results. Genes are ranked by the evidence strength that were calculated based on the volume of different types of published literature in human genome epidemiology. The results of a query provide tons of helpful links, including links to information about each candidate gene found, exportable lists of journal articles where the results of association studies, GWASs, and meta-analyses were published, information about SNPs in these genes, and more.

Overall this seems like a great place to start when you want to compare your results to others, or when you just want more information about particular genotype-phenotype associations.

Gene Prospector