Frequently Asked Questions

Mastermind FAQ

Questions and Answers

Content | Applications | Functionality | Implementation

Content

• Does Mastermind provide access to articles to users without journal subscriptions?

No. Mastermind does not provide direct, online access to articles if those articles are not already available to users – either for free or through an institutional subscription. If a PDF is available to you through the publisher website, the PDF Viewer will allow you to view the full-text publication within Mastermind. If you do not have an institutional subscription to the journal, Mastermind will provide you a link through the publisher or via PubMed to purchase access to the article.

Applications

• Does Mastermind differentiate between positive and negative associations for diseases and genes or diseases and variants?

No. Mastermind searches for all mentions of a disease, gene or variant, but does not draw conclusions about the nature of the association between the disease and variant or gene. We leave that to the experienced curators.

• Does Mastermind provide variant interpretations or reports?

No. In contrast to knowledge-bases like HGMD, Mastermind does not draw conclusions about the clinical significance of individual variants but rather provides the user with all the evidence necessary to make these conclusions on their own.

• How is Mastermind different from HGMD, ClinVar and other genomic knowledge-bases?

Mastermind is a search engine to accelerate variant curation. Rather than manually curating a hundreds of articles per quarter, we are indexing millions of genomic articles. Where HGMD has curated 80K+ articles, Mastermind has indexed over 5 million articles. In contrast to HGMD, Mastermind does not draw conclusions about the clinical significance of individual variants but rather provides the user with all the evidence necessary to make these conclusions on their own.

• What does Mastermind offer that differentiates it from PubMed and Google Scholar searches?

A single Mastermind query delivers prioritized search results across millions of full text articles. As compared to PubMed which only searches the article abstracts, Mastermind searches and indexes the full text of the articles, providing 15X deeper variant coverage than what can be found by searching abstracts. Mastermind also indexes every possible genomic permutation (cDNA/protein, expanded/contracted, conventional/non-canonical) to create a comprehensive search environment that yields more results over PubMed and Google Scholar with a single search query. Mastermind serves as a comprehensive variant curation tool to aggregate the results based on the biomedical literature, whereas PubMed and Google Scholar only catalogue citations.

Functionality

• How can you search for variants across the protein structure in Mastermind?

The protein diagram. Entering a gene name in the “Gene” search box on the Mastermind home page will evoke the “Variant” search box. Coding mutations can be found by typing the one letter code of the original amino acid residue, followed by the position in the protein, and ending with the one letter code of the resulting amino acid. For example, V600E, refers to the change from valine to glutamic acid at position 600 in the protein. Coding variants can also be selected from the auto-fill drop down menu.

• How can I search for coding mutations in Mastermind?

Entering a gene name in the “Gene” search box on the Mastermind home page will evoke the “Mutation” search box. Coding mutations can be found by typing the one letter code of the original amino acid residue, followed by the position in the protein, and ending with the one letter code of the resulting amino acid. For example, V600E, refers to the change from valine to glutamic acid at position 600 in the protein. Coding variants can also be selected from the auto-fill drop down menu.

• How are insertions and deletions, non-sense, frameshift, and non-coding variants displayed in Mastermind?

The “FILTER BY VARIANT” feature in the "Variants" section of the Mastermind results page can be used to find such mutations. For example, “INS” or “DEL” will filter the results for insertions and deletions. Typing “X” will filter for all non-sense mutations. Frameshift mutations can be found by typing “FS”. Typing “UTR” will filter the results for variants in untranslated regions of the protein. The abbreviations “SD” or “SA” can be used to filter the results for all splice donor or splice acceptor sites, respectively.

• What is the association strength and how can I use it to qualify my results?

The association strength is a measure of how frequently the selected search terms are mentioned in the text of the article, how close together they appear and where they appear in the article. It is intended to be a relative and not an absolute estimation of the relevance of the content to your search queries. This ranking is depicted in the impact plot - the size of each circle represents the relevance of the article to the selected key terms, the larger the circle, the greater the relevance. By default, Mastermind will order the publications by their association strength in the Articles List.

• What are the Categories in Mastermind and how can they be used?

The default categories in Mastermind include: Diagnosis (Dx); Prognosis (Px); Treatment (Rx); Function (Fx); Inheritance (Ix); Mechanism (Mx); SNP or variation (SNP); Goldmine (GM); Case Report (CR); CM and Custom Match (CM). Each of these categories allows the user to display only those articles that contain content that is relevant to each individual category based on the appearance of any of the given category’s key terms. Case Reports identify articles that are case reports as defined in PubMed. Goldmine articles include those articles that describe large-scale studies of cohorts where sequencing was performed (e.g. exome sequencing). The Custom Match identifies key words that are specifically associated with the content for the disease and gene in the original search. Mastermind produces this list of custom key terms by aggregating the content of each of these articles, performing a word frequency calculation, normalizing this list against the rest of scientific literature and then orders the terms by their frequency of occurrence in the content of interest. As an example, for the disease-gene association Melanoma-BRAF, the Custom Match category comprises anti-BRAF inhibitors like Vemurafenib and Imatinib as well as other genes such as GNAQ and ancillary disease terms like uveal.

• How can I see all articles for a given variant if the variant does not appear in the Title of Abstract of the paper?

In many instances, reported variants will not appear in the Title or Abstract of a paper, but may be mentioned in the body of the text. The Variants section of Mastermind search results separately displays the number of variants identified in the full-text and Title or Abstract. Clicking on the “Full-text” link will display those papers where the variant was identified somewhere in the full-text. Note that the number of citations will be considerably larger than that for the Title/Abstract, and may need to be filtered further using other keyword or categories.

Implementation

• What browsers are currently supported by Mastermind?

Google Chrome is the preferred browser. For instance, to view the articles as PDFs in Mastermind, you will need to use Google Chrome. Additionally, you will need to have the Mastermind extension for the Google Chrome Browser, which can be installed locally on your own computer:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/mastermind-extension/afjaifocdahgfpfgepaniahacjjoeeli?hl=en-US

If you do not have Google Chrome installed yet on your computer, you can download it from https://www.google.com/chrome/ and follow the download instructions for your computer platform.