What can help you determine the significance of genetic variants?

Resources

Tools & data

The Variant Browser

A major challenge facing contemporary genomic medicine is the clinical community’s desire for yes/no answers to the nuanced question of whether a specific genetic variant will produce a meaningful phenotype. Today’s framework classifies variants from likely pathogenic / pathogenic to likely benign / benign, with most stuck as a variant of uncertain significance. At VariantBrowser.org we instead present a data-driven estimate of disease penetrance alongside the raw data, in searchable tables, for interpreting variants in KCNQ1, KCNH2, and SCN5A.

Heuristically, the diagnostic information one learns about a variant from its three-dimensional location, in vitro functional data, and in silico predictors is roughly equivalent to clinically phenotyping 10–20 heterozygotes. Published in PLOS Genetics (2020), Circ. Genomic & Precision Medicine (2021), and Genetics in Medicine (2022).

Open-source toolkit

Our methods are released as reusable, documented code. Everything below is on GitHub.

GeneVariantFetcher

LLM-driven discovery and extraction of per-variant carrier and phenotype evidence from the PubMed literature.

GenePhenExtract

LLM-powered structured extraction of gene, variant, and phenotype data from the published record.

variantFeatures

Aggregates AlphaMissense, REVEL, CADD, ClinVar, and gnomAD into one unified, queryable SQLite database.

KCNH2_DMS

Deep mutational scanning of KCNH2/Kv11.1 trafficking — perturbation data for thousands of variants at once.

Bayes_BrS1_Penetrance

Predicting Brugada syndrome penetrance from NaV1.5 (SCN5A) functional, structural, and sequence features.

Q1_5A_Structure_Function

Predicting functional perturbation in KV7.1 (KCNQ1) and NaV1.5 (SCN5A) from structure and sequence.

RyR2-disease-penetrance

Carrier data and disease-penetrance estimates for CPVT-associated RyR2 variants.

LQTS-Penetrance-APC-MAVE

Patient- and variant-specific features for the risk of severe cardiac events in long QT syndrome.

Additional components — the Bayesian penetrance estimator, AlphaFold structural-proximity analysis, and the ClinGen gene–disease curation app — are in active development and available on request.