genenames.org: the HGNC resources in 2011

Abstract

The HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC) aims to assign a unique gene symbol and name to every human gene. The HGNC database currently contains almost 30,000 approved gene symbols, over 19,000 of which represent protein-coding genes. The public website, www.genenames.org, displays all approved nomenclature within Symbol Reports that contain data curated by HGNC editors and links to related genomic, phenotypic and proteomic information. Here we describe improvements to our resources, including a new Quick Gene Search, a new List Search, an integrated HGNC BioMart and a new Statistics and Downloads facility.

Figure 1.

The proportion of HGNC gene symbols annotated with each locus type. The main doughnut chart shows the proportions of major locus groups. The purple region represents genes annotated with the non-protein-coding RNA locus group; the smaller chart shows the proportion of RNA genes annotated with each RNA-specific locus type. The ‘RNA, misc’ category groups together RNA locus types that represent a small number of genes. These are: ‘RNA, Cajal body-specific’, ‘RNA, ribosomal’, ‘RNA, small cytoplasmic’, ‘RNA, vault’, ‘RNA, Y’, ‘RNA, RNase’ and ‘RNA, telomerase’. A full list of locus types, along with total numbers of approved symbols for each category, can be viewed at our Statistics and Downloads facility (www.genenames.org/stats).

Figure 2.

An example of the results output generated by the HGNC List Search. The ‘Match Type’ column shows how each submitted symbol is related to the matched gene entry. Each approved symbol is hyperlinked to the HGNC Symbol Report so that users can view further information on the matched genes.