One of the most pressing challenges in genomic medicine is to understand the role played by genetic variation in health and disease. Thanks to the exploration of genomic variants at large scale, hundreds of thousands of disease-associated loci have been uncovered. However, the identification of variants of clinical relevance is a significant challenge that requires comprehensive interrogation of previous knowledge and linkage to new experimental results. To assist in this complex task, we created DisGeNET (http://www.disgenet.org/), a knowledge management platform integrating and standardizing data about disease associated genes and variants from multiple sources, including the scientific literature. DisGeNET covers the full spectrum of human diseases as well as normal and abnormal traits. The current release covers more than 24 000 diseases and traits, 17 000 genes and 117 000 genomic variants. The latest developments of DisGeNET include new sources of data, novel data attributes and prioritization metrics, a redesigned web interface and recently launched APIs. Thanks to the data standardization, the combination of expert curated information with data automatically mined from the scientific literature, and a suite of tools for accessing its publicly available data, DisGeNET is an interoperable resource supporting a variety of applications in genomic medicine and drug R&D.

Supramolecular chemistry has recently emerged as a promising way to modulate protein functions, but devising molecules that will interact with a protein in the desired manner is difficult as many competing interactions exist in a biological environment (with solvents, salts or different sites for the target biomolecule). We now show that lysine-specific molecular tweezers bind to a 14-3-3 adapter protein and modulate its interaction with partner proteins. The tweezers inhibit binding between the 14-3-3 protein and two partner proteins--a phosphorylated (C-Raf) protein and an unphosphorylated one (ExoS)--in a concentration-dependent manner. Protein crystallography shows that this effect arises from the binding of the tweezers to a single surface-exposed lysine (Lys214) of the 14-3-3 protein in the proximity of its central channel, which normally binds the partner proteins. A combination of structural analysis and computer simulations provides rules for the tweezers' binding preferences, thus allowing us to predict their influence on this type of protein-protein interactions.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.