To promote the use of yeast for biomedical research, SGD utilizes the Disease Ontology (DO) to describe human diseases that are associated with yeast homologs. Disease Ontology annotations to yeast genes are available through SGD’s Disease pages. Each page corresponds to a Disease Ontology term, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or neurodegenerative disease, and lists all yeast genes annotated to the term by SGD.
Figure 1. SGD’s Disease Ontology page for neurodegenerative disease
Yeast genes with one or more human disease associations will also have a Disease page (example: MIP1), accessible from its gene page. The Disease page shows all manually curated, high-throughput, and computational disease annotations for the yeast gene. These pages also feature network diagrams that depict shared disease annotations for other yeast genes and their human homologs.
Figure 2. Shared disease annotation network for MIP1
For more information, check out SGD’s Disease Ontology help page. Explore the Disease pages and features, and be sure to let us know if you have any feedback or questions.