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Citation: Zhou et al., Nature Commun. 2019 10(1):1523.
About Us
Questions and comments can be sent to: coronascape.team at gmail dot com.

The team: Yingyao Zhou & Bin Zhou (GNF); Max Chang & Chris Benner (UCSD); Jun Yin, Rabi Murad, Lars Pache and Sumit Chanda (Sanford Burnham Prebys).

What is Coronascape?
Cronoascape is a free COVID-related reference host gene lists collected from published and unpublished studies, processed and curated by the Metascape team. Users can compare their own gene list with a selected panel of COVID lists using the powerful Metascape Express Analysis tool. There are three basic steps, provide your gene list, use purple tabs to select reference lists, then run Metascape Analysis. To learn more regarding the underlying bioinformatics analysis, please visit Metascape web site.

How to Cite Coronascape?
Coronascape leaverages the power of Metascape, please cite the Metascape paper: Zhou et al., Nature Communications 2019, 10(1):1523.. We will really appreciate if you also show our URL [http://coronascape.org] in your text. If you like Coronascape or Metascape, help us spread the words.

Can I Add My Gene Lists to the Reference?
Absolutely, please contact "coronascape.team at gmail dot com".

Which Reference Lists to Choose?
The best way is to paste in your gene list, then use the Recommendation tab to search for similar COVID lists that is most overlapped. The top matches should provide the most meaningful Metascape Analysis results. This is similar to the PSI-BLAST idea in sequence similarity search. If no reference list is provided, when you the "Metascape Analysis" button is clicked, the web site will automatically do the simialrity search and pick up to 3 lists as your reference.

How Many Reference Lists Can be Included?
Maximally 8. In addition to the computational cost, the multi-list visualization becomes challenging to read, when there are too many color codes. We recommend to keep the reference lists below 4 to have the best results. If you absolutely need to analyze more lists, just "Download Reference Lists" to obtain the data and then upload to the Metascape web site with Multiple Gene List analysis.

What is the Difference between Use Selected and Append Selected?
You shop for reference COVID lists and add them to the shopping cart "Reference Lists to Compare". After check a few lists, "use Selected" will overwrite the cart with your current selection. "Append Selected" will append your selection to the existing cart with duplicates removed. Using "Append Select", you can pick your reference lists using different tools (tabs).

Why the Size of Reference Lists are below 300?
Human genome only contains 20,000 genes, therefore, the signal in a large gene list is very likley heavily diluted. We, therefore, limited each gene list to 300 top-ranking genes, as this threshold tends to yield better results based on our own research experience. If you contribute your gene list, we would ask you to rank the candidates, so that we can apply rank cutoffs.

How Do I Learn More about Metascape Analysis?
The backend of Coronascape is Metascape - a power gene-list analysis resource for biologist. When a user clicks "Metascape Analysis", the standard "Express Analysis" is performed on the combination of the user's list and the reference lists. Users more familiar with Metascape can also download the gene lists and use Metascape site to perform "Custom Analysis".