Man (OMIM; http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db1/4OMIM) database, which focuses on rare disease-causing genetic variants and has only recently begun to include more common diseases. Our database systematically collects population-based genetic association studies dealing with common diseases, regardless of whether they report positive findings. Our applications display search results on the web page in tabular format, which is more efficient and user-friendly than the free plain text format used by OMIM. The automatic generation of hypothetical disease–gene networks and the integration of pathway information provide additional means for exploring hidden potential connections (Ekins et al., 2007; Goh et al., 2007). Currently, the association data in our database are indexed only at the gene level. We have experimented with extracting and displaying gene–disease association data (including published reference, phenotype, number of studies, number of cases, number of controls, contrast, effect size and heterogeneity) at the variant level for meta-analysis studies only (see example in Supplementary Fig. 1E). In our future work, we plan to collect gene variant-level information systematically and display it on the web accordingly, in table format. We also plan to create application programming interfaces or web services to facilitate integration with other systems.
