Researchers are finding it more and more difficult to follow the changing status of disease candidate genes due to the exponential increase in gene mapping studies. The Text-mined Hypertension, Obesity and Diabetes candidate gene database (T-HOD) is developed to help trace existing research on three kinds of cardiovascular diseases: hypertension, obesity and diabetes, with the last disease categorized into Type 1 and Type 2, by regularly and semiautomatically extracting HOD-related genes from newly published literature. Currently, there are 837, 835 and 821 candidate genes recorded in T-HOD for hypertension, obesity and diabetes, respectively. T-HOD employed the state-of-art text-mining technologies, including a gene/disease identification system and a disease-gene relation extraction system, which can be used to affirm the association of genes with three diseases and provide more evidence for further studies. The primary inputs of T-HOD are the three kinds of diseases, and the output is a list of disease-related genes that can be ranked based on their number of appearance, protein-protein interactions and single-nucleotide polymorphisms. Unlike manually constructed disease gene databases, the content of T-HOD is regularly updated by our text-mining system and verified by domain experts. The interface of T-HOD facilitates easy browsing for users and allows T-HOD curators to verify data efficiently. We believe that T-HOD can help life scientists in search for more disease candidate genes in a less time-and effort-consuming manner.
