This page contains helpful information to troubleshoot and/or improve your searches in our online database. There are two search engines made available on the website. Under the Database menu, Gene Expression provides a search engine to find genes of interests and view their expression profiles. This feature can display up to the first 100 genes among all the genes returned from the result of the search. Gene Information provides a way to quickly search and return all the qualified genes and their relevant information but cannot link to expression profiles.

If a search returns more than 100 genes, please use the Gene Information search engine to find your gene of interest. Then use the additional information to better specify and describe that gene in the Gene Expression search engine in order to view its expression profile.

In general, the following tips may be helpful:

1. Fill in any field where you have relavant information on the gene of interest. At least one field should be filled. Otherwise, leave the fields empty.

2. "And" searches are not supported within each individual field. For example, entering the text "Dopamine&protein" under the field "name" will result in zero hit.

3. Wildcards are supported in the search engines. For example, entering the text "Dopamine%protein" under the field "name" will result in returning a dopamine receptor gene. In the above example, the percent symbol, "%" is the wild card and may be used to substitute for any number, letter, symbol(s) or words. The highlighting function will be disabled with the wildcard searches

4. The search engine implements a "full text" search. Matching any part of the text will result in returning that gene. For example, entering the text "sp1" under gene symbol will not only return the gene "sp1" but also genes with symbols of "lasp1", "hrsp12", etc. This feature helps identifying genes of interests when the user has an incomplete description for the genes.