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Gene Information eXtension (GIX): effortless retrieval of gene product information on any website

Nature Methods volume 16, pages 665–666 (2019)Cite this article

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To the Editor – Retrieving information about genes is a continuous and time-consuming aspect of systems biology. While there are resources that can fulfill this need, they require navigation to different and often complex websites, execution of a search (or searches) and selection of a result before the user can view pertinent information. To streamline this process, we developed a browser extension called GIX (Gene Information eXtension; https://gene-info.org) to allow users to retrieve gene information directly from a website without navigating to another page.

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Fig. 1: Screenshot of GIX in the Chrome browser.

Code availability

GIX is available for free without restriction at the Chrome Web Store and the Firefox Add-ons site. Download links, documentation, a tutorial video and source code can be found at https://gene-info.org.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to all members of the Gingras lab for feedback on the extension. We acknowledge funding from the Governments of Canada and Ontario through Genome Canada, Ontario Genomics and the Ontario Research Fund (OGI-139 and RE08-065 to A.-C.G.), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (Foundation grant FDN143301 to A.-C.G.) and the National Institutes of Health Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (R01OD010929 to M.T. and K. Dolinski). This research was enabled in part by support provided by Compute Canada (https://www.computecanada.ca). A.-C.G. is the Canada Research Chair in Functional Proteomics and the Lea Reichmann Chair in Cancer Proteomics; M.T. is the Canada Research Chair in Systems and Synthetic Biology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute, Sinai Health System, Toronto, ON, Canada

    James D. R. Knight, Payman Samavarchi-Tehrani & Anne-Claude Gingras

  2. Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer, Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Mike Tyers

  3. Department of Molecular Genetics, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada

    Anne-Claude Gingras

Authors
  1. James D. R. Knight
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  2. Payman Samavarchi-Tehrani
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  3. Mike Tyers
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  4. Anne-Claude Gingras
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Contributions

J.D.R.K., P.S.-T. and A.-C.G. conceived of the extension. J.D.R.K. wrote the code. M.T. provided input on the extension. J.D.R.K. and A.-C.G. wrote the manuscript with input from P.S.-T. and M.T.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anne-Claude Gingras.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Knight, J.D.R., Samavarchi-Tehrani, P., Tyers, M. et al. Gene Information eXtension (GIX): effortless retrieval of gene product information on any website. Nat Methods 16, 665–666 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-019-0477-9

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