GeneHancer is a database of human regulatory elements (enhancers and promoters) and their inferred target genes, which is embedded in GeneCards, a human gene compendium. The GeneHancer database was created by integrating >1 million regulatory elements from multiple genome-wide databases. Associations between the regulatory elements and target genes were based on multiple sources of linking molecular data, along with distance, as described in Methods below.
The GeneHancer track set contains tracks representing:
Each GeneHancer regulatory element is identified by a GeneHancer id. For example: GH0XJ101383 is located on chromosome X, with starting position of 101,383 kb (GRCh38/hg38 reference). Based on the id, one can obtain full GeneHancer information, as displayed in the Genomics section within the gene-centric web pages of GeneCards. Links to the GeneCards information pages are provided on the track details pages.
Colors are used to distinguish promoters and enhancers and to indicate the GeneHancer element confidence score:
Promoters: High Medium Low
Enhancers: High Medium Low
Colors are used to improve gene and interactions visibility. Successive genes are colored in different colors, and interactions of a gene have the same color.
The Interactions view in Full mode shows GeneHancers and target genes connected by curves or half-rectangles (when one of the connected regions is off-screen). Configuration options are available to change the drawing style, and to limit the view to interactions with one or both connected items in the region. Interactions are identified on mouseover or clicked on for details at the end regions, or at the curve peak, which is marked with a gray ring shape. Interactions in the reverse direction (Gene TSS precedes GeneHancer on the genome) are drawn with a dashed line.
The Clusters view groups interactions by target gene; the target gene and all GeneHancers associated with it are displayed in a single browser item. The gene TSS and associated GeneHancers are shown as blocks linked together, with the TSS drawn as a "tall" item, and the GeneHancers drawn "short". A user configuration option is provided to change the view to group by GeneHancer (with tall GeneHancer and short TSS's). Clusters composed of interactions with a single gene are colored to correspond to the gene, and those composed of interactions with multiple genes are colored dark gray.
GeneHancer identifications were created from >1 million regulatory elements obtained from seven genome-wide databases:
Employing an integration algorithm that removes redundancy, the GeneHancer pipeline identified ˜250k integrated candidate regulatory elements (GeneHancers). Each GeneHancer is assigned an annotation-derived confidence score. The GeneHancers that are derived from more than one information source are defined as "elite" GeneHancers.
Gene-GeneHancer associations, and their likelihood-based scores, were generated using information that helps link regulatory elements to genes:
Associations that are derived from more than one information source are defined as "elite" associations, which leads to the definition of the "double elite" dataset - elite gene associations of elite GeneHancers.
More details are provided at the GeneCards information page. For a full description of the methods used, refer to the GeneHancer manuscript1.
Source data for the GeneHancer version 4.8 was downloaded during May 2018.
Limited GeneHancer positional data may be explored with the Table Browser. The complete data are not found in the UCSC download servers as per the agreement with the Weizmann Institute.
GeneHancer is the property of the Weizmann Institute of Science and is not available for download or mirroring by any third party -without permission. Please contact the Weizmann Institute directly for data inquiries.
Thanks to Simon Fishilevich, Marilyn Safran, Naomi Rosen, and Tsippi Iny Stein of the GeneCards group and Shifra Ben-Dor of the Bioinformatics Core group at the Weizmann Institute, for providing this data and documentation, creating track hub versions of these tracks as prototypes, and overall responsiveness during development of these tracks.
Contact: simon. fishilevich@weizmann. ac. il
Supported in part by a grant from LifeMap Sciences Inc.
Fishilevich S., Nudel R., Rappaport N., Hadar R., Plaschkes I., Iny Stein T., Rosen N., Kohn A., Twik M., Safran M., Lancet D. and Cohen D. GeneHancer: genome-wide integration of enhancers and target genes in GeneCards, Database (Oxford) (2017), doi:10.1093/database/bax028. [PDF] PMID 28605766
Stelzer G, Rosen R, Plaschkes I, Zimmerman S, Twik M, Fishilevich S, Iny Stein T, Nudel R, Lieder I, Mazor Y, Kaplan S, Dahary, D, Warshawsky D, Guan- Golan Y, Kohn A, Rappaport N, Safran M, and Lancet D. The GeneCards Suite: From Gene Data Mining to Disease Genome Sequence Analysis, Current Protocols in Bioinformatics (2016), 54:1.30.1-1.30.33. doi: 10.1002/cpbi.5. PMID 27322403