October 29, 2015
If you’re interested in finding all the published literature about a gene or protein, there’s no need to wade through long lists of PubMed results. SGD curators have already done that for you! We review PubMed weekly for new papers about S. cerevisiae. You can find papers about a specific gene or protein on its Literature tab page (see an example).
Articles on the Literature page are categorized by several topics. The Primary Literature section lists papers in which the gene of interest is a primary focus of the study, while the Additional Literature section lists papers in which the gene is mentioned but is more peripheral to the research. There are other categories of references, and also a cool interactive graphic that shows the relationships between papers that are about the same set, or overlapping sets, of genes. You can get to the Literature page for a gene or protein via the Literature tab, located at the top of its Locus Summary page and all of its other tab pages.
Categories: Tutorial
Tags: video
October 26, 2015
Our GO Term Finder tool lets you start with a list of genes—perhaps a set of genes that are co-regulated, or a group of genes that can all mutate to the same phenotype—and analyze their Gene Ontology (GO) annotations to find out what else they might have in common. GO Term Finder searches for significantly shared terms within the GO annotations associated with the genes in your list. It takes advantage of the tree structure of GO to find terms that are related to each other within the ontology.
Finding shared terms within a gene set can bring meaning to experimental results and suggest new avenues to explore. For example, if the GO Term Finder results show that most of the genes in your co-regulated set mediate steps in a pathway, this might be a hint that the uncharacterized genes in the set also participate in that pathway. Or perhaps GO Term Finder will show that a group of genes that can mutate to confer resistance to a certain drug are all annotated to a certain cellular location, suggesting a mechanism for the effects of that drug. Give it a try and see what interesting results your gene list has in store!
Our new SGD Help video gives you a quick overview of how to use the GO Term Finder. You can find all the details on our GO Term Finder help page.
Categories: Tutorial
Tags: Gene Ontology, GO Term Finder, video
October 05, 2015
The GO Slim Mapper is a very useful tool that maps specific Gene Ontology (GO) annotations to more general GO terms. This allows you to take a group of genes and bin them into broad categories of function, process, or localization by mapping their GO annotations to broader terms.
Watch our new video to get an overview of how the GO Slim Mapper works:
Categories: Tutorial
Tags: Gene Ontology, GO Slim Mapper, video
August 10, 2015
Have you ever wondered just how many genes are found in the genome of the S. cerevisiae reference strain S288C, or how well characterized they are? SGD’s Genome Snapshot gives you a graphical overview of the annotation state of the genome, updated daily. This brief video gives you a tour of the page and explains the information shown in each section.
Categories: Tutorial
Tags: Genome Snapshot, video
July 28, 2015
Understanding lists and knowing how to work with them is crucial to getting the most out of YeastMine. This set of short videos explains everything you need to know.
YeastMine allows you to save objects in lists. Typically, these objects are genes, but you can also make lists of other objects such as Gene Ontology terms or PubMed IDs. One way to create a list in YeastMine is to run a query and save the results in a list. Another way is to type in or upload your own list.
Whenever you create a list in YeastMine, you’re immediately presented with information about the genes in the list, such as Gene Ontology and pathway enrichment, interactions, orthologs, and more. This can help you decide what kind of further analysis you’d like to do.
And what if you create a list but then realize that you forgot to include a gene? No worries. It’s easy to edit your saved lists.
Once you have a list of genes, you can feed it into any template query whose name begins with “Gene” to get results for all of the genes in the list. This powerful feature lets you run successive queries to narrow down your results. For example, you could make a list of all the proteins in a given size range, then query that list to see which ones are located in the nucleus, and finally ask how many of these nuclear proteins have human homologs.
And finally, once you’ve created and saved lists you can do a lot of different things with them: combine them, find their intersection, find genes that are not shared between two lists, or find genes that are in one list but not another. This provides a powerful way to combine or compare results from different YeastMine queries.
As always, please contact us if you have any questions about YeastMine. We’re happy to help!
Categories: Tutorial
July 13, 2015
The eminent Drosophila geneticist Michael Ashburner famously said: “Biologists would rather share their toothbrush than share a gene name.” It’s true that assigning names to genes is often a sticky subject.
In the Saccharomyces cerevisiae community we’re very lucky to have well-defined guidelines for genetic nomenclature, an established system for reserving gene names, and criteria for making them “standard,” or official, names. This system was agreed upon by yeast researchers nearly two decades ago and has served the community well.
Take a look at this video to get an overview of how the gene naming system works. And as always, please contact us with any questions or suggestions.
Categories: Tutorial
Tags: gene nomenclature, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, video
July 07, 2015
If you’re not already using YeastMine to answer all your questions about the Saccharomyces cerevisiae genome and the gene products it encodes…you should be!
This versatile tool lets you slice and dice data from SGD in any way you choose. You can ask questions like “How many proteins between 25 and 35 kDa in size are integral to the nuclear membrane?” or “Which genes can mutate to confer oxidative stress resistance, and what biological processes are they involved in?”
Start with this video to see a quick sample of three cool features in YeastMine.
Categories: Tutorial
June 30, 2015
Yeast and humans diverged about a billion years ago, but there’s still enough functional conservation between some pairs of yeast and human genes that they can be substituted for each other. How cool is that?! Which genes are they? What do they do?
This two-minute video explains how to find, search, and download the yeast-human functional complementation data in SGD. You can find help with many other aspects of SGD in the tutorial videos on our YouTube channel. And as always, please be sure to contact us with any questions or suggestions.
Categories: Homologs, New Data, Tutorial