If you are filtering a set of variants to look for those potentially involved in disease, your first stop will probably be databases of phenotype associations, like ClinVar. There is also a lot of valuable information on variant-disease associations in the literature, which may not yet have been extracted into curated databases. It can be hard to compile lists of citations for a large set of variants, but Ensembl VEP is here to help!
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Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: annotating structural variants
The Ensembl VEP does not only allow you to annotate short variants, such as SNPs and short insertions or deletions, but also some types of structural variants.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: VEP an animal
With all the fuss we make about our resources for human genomes, you might think the VEP was just for human; it’s not. We have really useful resources, like SIFT, phenotypes and caches for loads of other species in Ensembl.
Cool stuff the Ensembl VEP can do: phenotype and disease associations
If you’re trying to work out which variants are associated with a phenotype or disease, a major thing you might want to know is if someone else has already spotted it. And if not the variant, maybe the gene that it hits. You can get that through the VEP.
Cool things the Ensembl VEP can do: variant prioritisation with G2P
A common use case for the VEP is as a first step towards identifying the causal genetic variant of a rare phenotype from whole genome/exome sequencing. The VEP tells you which genes are hit, what effects they have on them, and you have to begin the long laborious process of filtering those down. Things you might consider include allele frequency, association with genes known to be involved in rare disease and whether both genes in a diploid organism are affected. Rather than faffing about doing this manually, you can use the G2P (genotype to phenotype) plugin instead, which was recently published as a preprint.