Transcriptome-Wide Association Studies (TWAS) Atlas is a curated knowledgebase of transcriptome-wide association studies. TWAS Atlas collects significant tissue-specific associations between genes and traits in each publication and constructs knowledge graph at the transcriptome level for available traits with remarkable SNP-gene associations ( eQTLs ) from GTEx database, realizing the integration and visualization of SNP-gene-trait associations at multi-omics levels. Users can clearly overview and easily download the information and knowledge graph from TWAS Atlas. Aggregating multiple evidences and intuitive graph in TWAS Atlas enable researchers to have a global grasp of the traits and genes of interest, facilitating the application and promotion of TWAS in clinical research. As one of core resources in the National Genomics Data Center of China, TWAS Atlas will continuously be updated with latest TWAS publications to provide users with more comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge support.
To enable users to query contents of interest efficiently and friendly, TWAS Atlas is equipped with several search channels as follows: i) A quick search box on the home page was provided for real-time querying service by typing trait name, gene identifier or tissue type. ii) We provided the advanced search function on the 'Search' page, allowing users directly accessing TWAS Atlas by their interested terms, like a certain trait like trait label and ontology ID, detailed gene information including gene symbol, Ensembl ID and genomic location and publication information like publication ID and PubMed ID. iii) On the 'Knowledge Graph' page, users can input the gene or trait of interest in and get the relevant graph centering on it, which is a more intuitive search method. Moreover, auto-suggestion function is supported in TWAS Atlas, providing candidate query terms for users based on even brief input.
Users can access the webpage through the database navigation bar labeled as 'Knowledge Graph'. Firstly, Users should select one trait or a gene of interest at a time as the center of the current graph. Then the relevant graph centering on it was presented.
The line that connects a gene to a trait contains three aspects of information. The color of the line represents the tissue type; The size of the line represents the magnitude of the significance of the association; The dotted and solid lines represent negative correlation and positive, respectively.
All nodes and lines in the graph are draggable, allowing users to adjust it. You can filter gene-trait associations through the filter boxes on the left of the webpage, including gene type, effect direction and tissue type. SNP-gene associations or tissue information whether to display or not also depends on users' own needs.
Finally, users would directly export the graph in a high-resolution mode for subsequent publication or other usage through the download button in the upper right corner.
To facilitating the global usability of TWAS knowledge, all data stored in TWAS Atlas are accessible. Firstly, all query results displayed on each web page can be downloaded to local as a tab-delimited file. Then, summary lists of relevant publications, available traits and genes, significant eQTL information used in TWAS Atlas are open access and publicly available on the 'Download' page.
If you want to use the TWAS Atlas in your research, please cite the resource as " TWAS Atlas: a curated knowledgebase of transcriptome-wide association studies. "
Email: twas@big.ac.cn
Postal Address:
National Genomics Data Center
Beijing Institute of Genomics (China National Center for Bioinformation), Chinese Academy of Sciences
No.104 building, No.1 Beichen West Road, Chaoyang District
Beijing 100101, China
