NOTE:
ClinVar is intended for use primarily by physicians and other
professionals concerned with genetic disorders, by genetics researchers, and
by advanced students in science and medicine. While the ClinVar database is
open to all academic users, users seeking information about a personal medical
or genetic condition are urged to consult with a qualified physician for
diagnosis and for answers to personal questions.
These tracks show the genomic positions of variants in the ClinVar database. ClinVar is a free, public archive of reports of the relationships among human variations and phenotypes, with supporting evidence.
The ClinVar CNVs track displays copy number variants (CNVs) equal or larger than 50 bp, and the ClinVar SNVs track displays substitutions and indels shorter than 50 bp. Until October 2017, all variants with the ClinVar types copy number gain/loss and DbVar "nsv" accessions were assigned in the CNV category. Because the ClinVar type no longer captures this information, any variation equal to or larger than 50 bp is now considered a CNV.
Note: The data in the track are obtained directly from ClinVar's FTP site. We display the data obtained from ClinVar as-is to avoid discrepancies between UCSC and NCBI. However, be aware that the ClinVar conventions are different from the VCF standard. Variants may be right-aligned or may contain additional context, e.g. for inserts. ExAC/gnomAD make available a converter to make ClinVar more comparable to VCF files.
The genomic locations of ClinVar variants are labelled with the ClinVar variant descriptions. Mouseover on items shows variant details, clinical interpretation, and associated conditions. Further information on each variant is displayed on the details page by a click onto any variant.
Entries in the ClinVar CNVs track are colored by type of variant, among others:
Entries in the ClinVar SNVs track are colored by clinical significance:
Items can be filtered according to the size of the variant, variant type, clinical significance, allele origin, and molecular consequence, using the track Configure options. Each subtrack has separate display controls, as described -here. +here.
For the human genome version hg19: the hg19 genome released by UCSC in 2009 had a mitochondrial genome "chrM" that was not the same as the one later used for most databases like ClinVar. As a result, we added the official mitochondrial genome in 2020 as "chrMT" and all mitochondrial annotations of ClinVar and most other databases are shown on the mitochondrial genome called "chrMT". For full description of the issue of the mitochondrial genome in hg19, please see the README file on our download site.
ClinVar publishes a new release on the first Thursday every month and this track is updated automatically at most six days later. The exact date of our last update is shown when you click onto any variant. You can find the previous versions of the track organized by month on our downloads server in the archive directory. To access one of these previous versions, paste the URL to one of the older files into our "Custom tracks" box.
The raw data can be explored interactively with the Table Browser or the Data Integrator. The data can be accessed from scripts through our API, the track names are "clinVarMain and "clinVarCnv".
For automated download and analysis, the genome annotation is stored in a bigBed file that can be downloaded from our download server. The files for this track are called clinVarMain.bb and clinVarCnv.bb. Individual regions or the whole genome annotation can be obtained using our tool bigBedToBed which can be compiled from the source code or downloaded as a precompiled binary for your system. Instructions for downloading source code and binaries can be found here. The tool can also be used to obtain only features within a given range, e.g. bigBedToBed http://hgdownload.soe.ucsc.edu/gbdb/hg19/bbi/clinvar/clinvarMain.bb -chrom=chr21 -start=0 -end=100000000 stdout
ClinVar files were reformatted at UCSC to the bigBed format. The data is updated every month, one week after the ClinVar release date. The program that performs the update is available on Github.
Thanks to NCBI for making the ClinVar data available on their FTP site as a tab-separated file.
Landrum MJ, Lee JM, Benson M, Brown G, Chao C, Chitipiralla S, Gu B, Hart J, Hoffman D, Hoover J et al. ClinVar: public archive of interpretations of clinically relevant variants. Nucleic Acids Res. 2016 Jan 4;44(D1):D862-8. PMID: 26582918; PMC: PMC4702865