How do I find a list of genes in a genomic region using the UCSC GenomeBrowser?
This tutorial will show how to use the UCSC genome browser to find a list of genes in agiven genomic region.
To navigate to the Genome Browser go to genome.ucsc.edu.
This page shows the main page for the Genome Browser and one of the two links in theupper left-hand corner will take you directly to the gateway page where one can choose
the organism. We will “click here to reset,” which puts us all on the default page sowe can all start at the same location, which is the human hg19 genome assembly. Byhitting the [submit] button, we go into the default page which shows the region aroundthe SOD1 gene with a number of data tracks turned on.
[0:54] The [hide all] button below the browser graphic gives us an opportunity to turnoff all the tracks and clean up the image. We will now turn on the UCSC Genes track to
pack visibility which turns on all of the genes in this particular region, which is just theSOD1 gene at the moment. Now, to put a larger gene region onto the GenomeBrowser, one can type in gene coordinates using the same format as you can see here:“chromosome colon start-coordinate hyphen end-coordinate.”[1:31] Or one can type in a number of other identifiers: “4p16.3” chromosome band.
The [go] button will take us to that location. You can see that there are multiple genes in
the window and multiple isoforms for many of these genes.
[1:54] To turn off the extra isoforms, go to the configuration page for the UCSC genes
track by clicking the little button on the left-hand side. The “splice variants” box canbe unchecked and then the [submit] button takes us back to the browser with only one
isoform for each gene selected.
[2:20] To get a list of the genes in this particular region we will use the Table Browser
by going to the “Tools…” menu then selecting the “Table Browser.” The UCSC genes
track is the default location for the Genome Browser and we will accept the “knownGene”
table. The “position” box can be selected here to limit our search to just thecoordinates for the chromosome band identified on the previous page. The Browser
remembers where you were in your previous browser window. For the “outputformat:” to get the gene names we must select from multiple tables so we will use“selected fields from primary and related tables” and then choose the [getoutput] button.
On this page we have the opportunity to choose “chromosome,” “transcriptionstart” and “transcription end” and then from the kg cross-reference (kgXref) table
we will choose “geneSymbol” which is the HGNC symbol, and a brief description of
the gene. [get output] will give us a screen that shows us the gene names and thegene coordinates and their brief description. You can see that we have multiple genes

with the same name. So we’re picking up each of the isoforms that were shown on theoriginal screen.
[3:40] Going back to the table browser now, we can use a different table as the primary
table if we are interested in getting only a single isoform for each gene. That table is the“knownCanonical” table. By typing the character “k” it takes me down into the k’s andthen the knownCanonical table can be selected from this list. Once again we will use“selected fields from primary and related tables.” And the [get output] gives us
a similar view where the knownCanonical table is the primary table. We will choose“chrom, chromStart, chromEnd,” and then once again from the cross reference table“gene symbol” and “description.” The [get output] button now gives us a page thathas one isoform for each gene.