Gene ORGANizer: Linking genes to the organs they affect

David Gokhman, Guy Kelman, Adir Amartely, Guy Gershon, Shira Tsur, Liran Carmel*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

37 Scopus citations

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges in studying how genes work is understanding their effect on the physiology and anatomy of the body. Existing tools try to address this using indirect features, such as expression levels and biochemical pathways. Here, we present Gene ORGANizer (geneorganizer.huji.ac.il), a phenotype-based tool that directly links human genes to the body parts they affect. It is built upon an exhaustive curated database that links >7000 genes to â 1/4150 anatomical parts using >150 000 gene-organ associations. The tool offers user-friendly platforms to analyze the anatomical effects of individual genes, and identify trends within groups of genes. We demonstrate how Gene ORGANizer can be used to make new discoveries, showing that chromosome X is enriched with genes affecting facial features, that positive selection targets genes with more constrained phenotypic effects, and more. We expect Gene ORGANizer to be useful in a variety of evolutionary, medical and molecular studies aimed at understanding the phenotypic effects of genes.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)W138-W145
JournalNucleic Acids Research
Volume45
Issue numberW1
DOIs
StatePublished - 3 Jul 2017

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s) 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research.

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