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Updated: Aug 6, 2026

Determining the Likelihood of Variant Pathogenicity Using Amino Acid-level Signal-to-Noise Analysis of Genetic Variation
Published on: January 16, 2019
'A variant of uncertain significance' and the proliferation of human disease gene databases
1Department of Molecular Sciences and The UT Center of Excellence in Genomics and Bioinformatics, University of Tennessee, Memphis, TN 38163, USA. dnelson@utmem.edu
Abstract:
The rapid accumulation of mutation data has led to the creation of nearly 300 locus-specific mutation databases. These sites may contain a few dozen to almost 20,000 mutations for a given gene. Many of the mutations are uncharacterised and have no known effects on the gene product, the 'variant of uncertain significance'. Here, the statistics of mutation distribution are examined for six different gene databases: BRCA1 and BRCA2, haemoglobin-beta (HBB), HPRT1, CFTR and TP53. The percentage of all possible point mutations for a protein (the mutation space) is calculated for each gene and the question 'How much mutation data is enough?' is raised.
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