We have added a new feature to ClinVar that allows you to follow a particular variant and be notified if the overall clinical interpretation in ClinVar changes, for example from a pathogenic category to a non-pathogenic one. This service will let you know about changes that may require you to update your analysis reports and contact your patients and ordering physicians. The new feature allows you to follow a variant from the variation page (Figure 1). Simply click the “Follow” button to begin receiving notifications.
Figure 1. A ClinVar variant page (VCV000541155.1) showing the ‘Follow’ button. The text on the button changes to ‘Following’ after you add it to your followed variants. Clicking ‘Following’ presents the option to ‘Unfollow’, which removes the variant from the followed list when clicked.
If you are not already signed in to your My NCBI account when you click the button, you will be asked to sign-in. If you don’t have a My NCBI account, you can sign-up for one in a few simple steps. For more information about My NCBI see the playlist on our YouTube channel.
You can see a list of variants that you are following in the ‘Collections’ section of your My NCBI (Figure 2). You can remove a variant from your notifications list at any time through the edit link on the ‘ClinVar Followed Variants’ line in your My NCBI ‘Collections’ .
Figure 2. The Collections section of a My NCBI account showing a collection of ‘ClinVar Followed Variants’ generated by clicking the ‘Follow’ button on the ClinVar variation pages. The ‘edit’ link allows you to remove a variant from your Collections and from your notifications list.
See the recording on our YouTube channel for more help with managing your Collections. As shown in Figure 1, you can also remove a variant from your notifications list (and your Collections) from the variant page by re-clicking the ‘Following’ button and selecting ‘Unfollow’.
We are considering adding a list of variants with changes in interpretation to our weekly report. Please take a look at a sample list of variants with a change in the overall interpretation for the week of October 14, 2019 and let us know if this bulk report is useful for you, and you’d like us to add it.
Please tell us more about how this feature worked for you and how we can improve notifications. Write to us at [email protected]