As part of our on-going efforts to improve the information available to users from the GWAS Catalog we are planning to make a few changes and would be very interested in hearing your feedback.
We have a new pipeline for producing the genomic information (i.e. the chromosome location, mapped genes), which is available alongside the curated content in the Catalog (the study information, SNPs, diseases and p-values associating them). This information is derived from publications.
We will change over to a newly built pipeline that uses Ensembl for mappings between SNPs and their nearest genes.
We will still provide mapped genes by gene name and Entrez gene ID, and will also provide mappings to Ensembl gene IDs.
As this will be a new pipeline, you might notice some minor changes in the data. This should not be any more noticable than changes between one genome build and the next. If you have any concerns about what this might mean for you, or your projects, please get in touch.
We hope to release a new REST API to the GWAS Catalog data, which will allow for much cleaner, more comprehensive programmatic access to the Catalog. You'll be able to use this API to download the entire Catalog contents, giving you access to richer data in a way that is easier to program against than downloading a spreadsheet.
If you currently have scripts or processes that run against the GWAS Catalog and would like to volunteer as a beta tester, please do get in touch!
We are also thinking about ways to provide access to more genomic information through the new API, so if you have things you'd like to see, or if you have particular frustrations about the way data is presented through the spreadsheet at the moment, let us know - we'll try to address as many requests as we can.
We plan to start rolling out these changes in early 2016, so please send us an e-mail on gwas-info@ebi.ac.uk or send us your ideas via @GWASCatalog on Twitter if you'd like to be involved or have further questions.
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