TCDB is operated by the Saier Lab Bioinformatics Group

Tutorial: Transporters & Human Disease

About:

  • This tutorial will teach you how to use the search form to retrieve (1) all transporters within a (sub)class or (sub)family involved in any disease, and (2) all transporters involved in a specific disease.

Anatomy of the form:

  • The search form consists of two input fields (Figure 1): (1) An input field that expects a TCID to search for all disease-related transport systems under the TC-SYSTEM hierarchy of the query TCID. This field accepts the "%" wildcard character to represent any system under any particular level. (2) a disease name or abbreviation to search for all transport systems involved in that disease.

    input form

    Figure 1. Anatomy of the search form. A. Search by TCID. B. Search by disease name.

    We will use the form in Figure 1 to search for all transport systems in the MFS (TC# 2.A.1) superfamily involved in diseases. We will also search for transporters associated with any type of "deafness".

    For details about the functionality of the header of the page shown in Figure 1, follow our tutorials: The "Search TCDB" box and The TCDB homepage.

A: Search human diseases by TCID.

  • In order to search for disease-related transporters in the MFS superfamily, we need to use the wildcard symbol (%) to represent all sytems under the TCID 2.A.1. Type the string "2.A.1.%" in the corresponding field of the form ((Figure 1A) and click on the button "Search by TCID". An excerpt of the results is presented in Figure 2.

    Search diseases by TCID

    Figure 2. Disease-related systems within the MFS superfamily (TC# 2.A.1).

    The results are organized in a 4-column table describing (1) the system linked to its entry in TCDB, (2) the description of the system, (3) the name of the disease, and (4) the accession and link to the corresponding entry in the Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMMIN) database. The input fields of the form are still available at the top of the page, in case you want narrow down the search further using a more specific TCID or the actual name of the disease (see next section).

    For a detailed description of the page you will be directed to after clicking on the TCID of interest (Figure 2), please, follow our tutorial: The system component entry page.

B: Search human diseases by name.

  • To search for all transport systems involved in any type of deafness, type the keyword "deafness" in the second input field of the form (Figure 1B) and click on the button "Search by disease name". The results are presented in Figure 3 and they have the same organization as in Figure 2.

    Search by disease name

    Figure 3. Transport systems involved in deafness. Occurrences of the keyword deafness are underlined in red.

    You can see the different types of diseases that result in deafness and the corresponding systems that belong to different families (first 3 components of the TCID).

    For a detailed description of the page you will be directed to after clicking on the TCID of interest (Figure 3), please, follow our tutorial: The system component entry page.

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