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Boesch, Sylvia

0000-0003-1657-7368

A5058514008 | I143397708

Mayo Clinic

Innsbruck Medical University

Citations 1

Gene Portals: A Framework for Integrating Clinical, Functional, and Structural Evidence into Rare Disease Variant Classification

No container title available | March 6, 2026 | Volume: No volume available | Issue: No issue available | Pages: No page available

10.64898/2026.03.05.26347086 | PMID 41822692

Abstract Rare Mendelian disorders affect 300-400 million people globally. Although genetic testing has become widely adopted, gene-specific evidence for tailored variant interpretation remains scattered across resources. We present Gene Portals, a framework for gene-centered multimodal knowledge bases that co-localize expert-harmonized clinical data, functional assays, population variation, structural annotations and gene-specific ACMG/AMP specifications within a single resource. A modular interface integrates this unified evidence with VCEP-refined ACMG specifications to enable automated gene-specific variant classification, infer molecular mechanisms, and support cross-gene analyses. We demonstrate the framework’s utility across five Gene portals spanning eleven neurodevelopmental disorder-associated genes, integrating data from 4,423 individuals with 2,838 unique variants, 36,149 ClinVar submissions, and 1,044 expert-curated molecular readouts. By organizing evidence that is otherwise dispersed across multiple sources into a unified, queryable framework, the SCN, GRIN, CACNA1A, SATB2 and SLC6A1 Gene Portals became widely used community resources and provide an extensible template for standardized rare-disease variant interpretation and mechanism-aware discovery.