Making Genetic Data Accessible to Researchers

Researchers seeking information about genes and genetic variants face the challenge of needing to search multiple databases, each with their own unique set of formatting issues. To unlock the information they are seeking, they often must spend hours wading through databases, restructuring data, and addressing nonstandard annotations. A groups of scientists at The Scripps Research Institute is addressing that problem through the development of two web services—MyGene.info and MyVariant.info—that pull data from multiple databases and provide a uniform structure for the information. We spoke to Chunlei Wu, associate professor of molecular medicine at Scripps Research Institute, about the services, the challenges in maintaining and keeping current these rapidly growing data sets, and how they are changing research into genetic-based disorders. The team's study in Genome Biology about the services can be found at http://bit.ly/1U88uAW.