HGNChelper: Identification and correction of invalid gene symbols for human and mouse

Please cite our software:

Oh S, Abdelnabi J, Al-Dulaimi R et al. HGNChelper: identification and correction of invalid gene symbols for human and mouse. F1000Research 2020, 9:1493 https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.28033.1

Why HGNChelper?

Physicians and biologists like gene symbols and bioinformaticians hate’em. Why? For one thing, they change constantly and are given new names or aliases. For another, some get munged into dates when imported into spreadsheet programs - and not only Excel (Thank you @karawoo for the picture!):

Myself (Levi speaking), I don’t mind them. It’s way easier to remember TP53 than to remember 7157 or ENSG00000141510. They’re a fact of life. So Sehyun Oh, Markus Riester, and I wrote HGNChelper to make them a little more pleasant to bioinformaticians.

  • See the Articles link above for a vignette describing package use
  • See the Reference for function documentation.
  • See the GitHub page for creating your own package update with the most current gene lists, rather than updating within R as described in the vignette