SoftPanel: a website for grouping diseases and related disorders for generation of customized panels

摘要

BackgroundTargeted next-generation sequencing is playing an increasingly important role in biological research and clinical diagnosis by allowing researchers to sequence high priority genes at much higher depths and at a fraction of the cost of whole genome or exome sequencing. However, in designing the panel of genes to be sequenced, investigators need to consider the tradeoff between the better sensitivity of a broad panel and the higher specificity of a potentially more relevant panel. Although tools to prioritize candidate disease genes have been developed, the great majority of these require prior knowledge and a set of seed genes as input, which is only possible for diseases with a known genetic etiology.