Dear user,

This archive contains four gene file templates that can be as a base to construct your own gene file.

These gene files contain rows with Symbol, Ensembl and Regulation. Exact match of Symbol and Ensembl against the Discovery gene database is done.
Regulation provides a visually annotation that can be either up (positive value) or down (negative value). A value of 0 is regarded as neutral and is not handled
any differently from not providing a value.

A gene file can also be a plain list of Symbols and/or Ensembls, with one or more genes per row separated by white-space, commas or semi-colons.
Genes in such a list have no regulation. Gene files exported from Discovery (CSV) can be uploaded as they are.

The following templates are included:
 1. Genes.txt
 2. GenesColon.csv
 3. GenesSemicolon.csv
 4. ExcelGenes.xlsx

The text-based files (1-3) contain a description on how to construct the content. The last file (4) is a Microsoft Office Excel
spread sheet (in OpenDocument format) that is well defined and contain some example rows.

Processing of all the gene files share some key behaviours worth noting.
If a gene is matched more than once, only the first will be used and others will be silently discarded. This also means that only the first regulation value is applied.
If both Symbol and Ensembl are provided and they match different genes, both genes will be used.
Rows starting with # and empty rows are ignored.

Consider the following rows:

Symbol		Ensembl			Regulation		Result
ZIC1		ENSG00000152977		0			Match single gene by Symbol and Ensembl
BRCA1		ENSG00000012048		-1			Match single gene by Symbol and Ensembl
TSPAN6		ENSG00000000003         2			Match single gene by Symbol and Ensembl
TSPAN6		ENSG00000000003         -2			Ignored as gene already matched and regulation is silently discarded
QSOX1		<empty>						Match single gene by Symbol
<empty>		ENSG00000105894					Match single gene by Ensembl
BRCA2		ENSG00000163026					Match two different genes by Symbol and Ensembl, both are used

This will result in the following seven (7) genes:
 - ZIC1		ENSG00000152977
 - BRCA1	ENSG00000012048		down regulated
 - TSPAN6	ENSG00000000003		up regulated
 - QSOX1	ENSG00000116260
 - PTN		ENSG00000105894
 - BRCA2	ENSG00000139618
 - WDCP		ENSG00000163026

Symbols and Ensembls that cannot be matched to exactly one gene are presented in the File Issues panel.

Note that '<empty' depicts a white-space character in the case of using a .txt or .csv file, and empty cell if using the Excel file.

Please contact Discovery support (you can find the contact details on the Disovery page) if you are having any issues or got any questions.

File version 1.1 released 2026-09-25.
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