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In the face of unprecedented amounts of sequencing data generated by the genetic and genomic revolution, researchers have established a dizzying number of databases aiming to harness this new information. Sharing and pooling of such data have accelerated scientific progress, but questions remain about how the results will impact medical practice. Each of these databases has a different purpose and different structure—and different data. It is vital that oncologists and other health-care providers, who increasingly rely on genetic databases for information to predict patients’ inherited cancer risk, understand that these databases are not equivalent, and that only some contain clinical-grade data.
To understand the differences in databases, it is first necessary to know how gene variants correlate with pathogenicity. In general, variants are classified into ...
