SNPnexus: a web server for functional annotation of novel and publicly known genetic variants (2012 update)

Broader functional annotation of single nucleotide variations is a valuable mean for prioritizing targets in further disease studies and large-scale genotyping projects. We originally developed SNPnexus to assess the potential significance of known and novel SNPs on the major transcriptome, proteome, regulatory and structural variation models in order to identify the phenotypically important variants. Being committed to providing continuous support to the scientific community, we have substantially improved SNPnexus over time by incorporating a broader range of variations such as insertions/deletions, block substitutions, IUPAC codes submission and region-based analysis, expanding the query size limit, and most importantly including additional categories for the assessment of functional impact. SNPnexus provides a comprehensive set of annotations for genomic variation data by characterizing related functional consequences at the transcriptome/proteome levels of seven major annotation systems with in-depth analysis of potential deleterious effects, inferring physical and cytogenetic mapping, reporting information on HapMap genotype/allele data, finding overlaps with potential regulatory elements, structural variations and conserved elements, and retrieving links with previously reported genetic disease studies. SNPnexus has a user-friendly web interface with an improved query structure, enhanced functional annotation categories and flexible output presentation making it practically useful for biologists. SNPnexus is freely available at http://www.snp-nexus.org.