Selecting the Gene Database Type

Overview

Genes can be identified by a large number of different synonyms and looked up in a number of different databases. In order to provide database lookup of genes GeneLinker™ needs to know what database the imported gene identifiers refer to.

GeneLinker™ recognizes four different types of gene identifiers, corresponding to four different gene databases. These are:

1. Affymetrix identifiers: Referred to as probe set identifiers in Affymetrix literature. This is the Gene Database type to choose when you are importing data which originated on Affymetrix chips.

Examples: 100_g_at 41848_f_at AFFX-BioB-3_at

See Affymetrix Identifiers for more information.

2. GenBank identifiers: GenBank accession numbers which refer to the GenBank sequence database maintained by NCBI.

Examples: AF111785 NM_002128 X12597

See GenBank Identifiers for more information.

3. UniGene identifiers: Cluster numbers which refer to the UniGene database maintained by NCBI.

Examples: Hs.172028 Mm.3037 Rn.36437

See UniGene Identifiers for more information.

4. Custom identifiers: If your gene or spot identifiers do not fall into one of the categories above, we recommend you designate them as Custom identifiers. You may be able to instruct GeneLinker™ how to look up Custom identifiers by changing a setting in your User Preferences. See Changing Your User Preferences for more information.

Note: gene identifiers have a length restriction of 25 characters. This means that on import of a dataset or a gene list, identifiers that are longer than 25 characters are truncated.