New IRDIRC Recognized Resource: “The Model Organism Aggregated Resources for Rare Variant ExpLoration (MARRVEL)”

MARRVEL (Model organism Aggregated Resources for Rare Variant ExpLoration), a new IRDiRC recognized resource, is available online! It is a search engine that collects data from a number of human genomics and model organism genetics databases and displays it in a rapid user-friendly format.

<<MARRVEL is a publicly available website that integrates information from six human genetic databases and seven model organism databases. For any given variant or gene, MARRVEL displays information from OMIM, ExAC, ClinVar, Geno2MP, DGV, and DECIPHER. Importantly, it curates model organism-specific databases to concurrently display a concise summary regarding the human gene homologs in budding and fission yeast, worm, fly, fish, mouse, and rat on a single webpage.>>

It was created in 2017 by a group of researchers in the Undiagnosed Disease Network at Baylor College of Medicine as a one-stop data collection tool to facilitate the use of public genetic resources to prioritize rare human gene variants for study in model organisms. The manuscript describing this resource was selected as one of the top 10 papers published that year in the American Journal of Human Genetics . MARRVEL is continuously updated to integrate new useful databases as they become available.