Gene: Your Portal into NCBI's Eukaryotic Genome Annotations

NCBI's Gene resource (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene) integrates data from multiple sources to provide a plethora of gene-specific information to aid in research and analyses. Genome annotations are taken from NCBI's RefSeq database, making it a convenient way to access annotations for over 260 eukaryotes annotated with NCBI's eukaryotic genome annotation pipeline, as well as annotation for hundreds of other eukaryotes propagated from GenBank. The content (citations, nomenclature, genomic location, gene products and their attributes, phenotypes, sequences, interactions, variation details, maps, expression, homologs, protein domains and external databases) is available via interactive browsing through NCBI's Entrez system, via NCBI's Entrez programming utilities (E-Utilities and Entrez Direct) and for bulk transfer by FTP.

This talk will focus on key features of Gene, including the graphical viewer for the genome annotation which includes access to a variety of supplemental tracks including RNA-seq expression data, and is easily configured through a new, customizable Track Sets feature. Genome annotations available from Ensembl or GenBank for the same assembly are also viewable in the graphical display, and identifiers for similar annotations are provided to help integrate with other datasets. Gene also provides access to orthology information computed for over 150 vertebrates with crosslinks to corresponding human and mouse records, and this information is used to provide informative nomenclature. Data is also imported from model organism databases, the Gene Ontology Consortium, KEGG, REACTOME, and many other sources to provide a powerful portal to a wide variety of data.