Finding External Ids

Finding Identifiers for External Databases

• There are a large number of external databases and bioinformatics resources that are not incoporated into the DRSC. If you want to use those resources, you will need to obtain whatever kind of gene identifier your resource of interest requires.
• Common identifiers include gene symbols, FBgns (FlyBase Ids), NCBI accessions, and Swissprot identifer. All of these are displayable columns on the hit list page.
• If your genes of interest are all in a screen hit list and your external resource of interest accepts one of the identifiers that can be displayed as a column on the hit list page, then it is quite easy to obtain a list of identifiers for your resource of interest. Here's how to do it:
  1. Select in the hit list those rows that contain the genes you'd like to submit to the external resource. Click "Display Selected Rows".
  2. Next, use the menu at the bottom of the page to change which columns are displayed such that only the column containing the identifer is displayed.
  3. Click the "Download Tab-Delimited File" button and save the file.
  4. Open this file, copy and paste its contents into the entry form of your resource of interest.
• If one or more of your genes of interest are not in the hit list, use the gene lookup tool.
• If the identifier that you need is not available through the DRSC, you will need to use a tool such as Bioinformatic Harvester.

FBgn Tool

• Flybase Ids are identifies in the format FBgn0000000. It is a common identifier for fly genes.
• The FBgn Tool allows batch lookup of these ids given a list of gene symbols.