What does an Entrez Gene ID look like?

Question

[Dan]

Is there a schema to recognize an Entrez Gene ID?

Performing this search: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/?term=test

It looks like they are just numbers, is that correct?

Do they always begin with 1, or is that just Benford's law?

Thanks, Dan.

[Denise CS]

The Entrez gene ID will be numbers, not to be mistaken for gene official symbol, which for human genes are given by HGNC. You may want to use Ensembl stable IDs that start with ENS (for Ensembl) and will contain a 3-letter code for all non-human species e.g. ENSMUSXXXXXXXXXXX for Mus musculus.

[GenoMax]

More in this paper.

Entrez Gene generates unique integers (GeneID) as stable identifiers for genes and other loci for a subset of model organisms. It tracks those identifiers and uses them to integrate multiple types of information including nomenclature, summary descriptions, accessions of gene-specific and gene product-specific sequences, chromosomal localization, reports of pathways and protein interactions, associated markers and phenotypes.

Answer 1

[EagleEye]

Yes those are just numbers. Example (human),

https://github.com/santhilalsubhash/geneSCF/blob/master/geneSCF-master-v1.0/test/sample_gene_list_id

Gene Symbols as follows (human),

https://github.com/santhilalsubhash/geneSCF/blob/master/geneSCF-master-v1.0/test/sample_gene_list_sym

Answer 2

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

All entrez ids are numbers. To check that an Entrez id is valid, you can simply use the Entrez Eutils APIs:

• https://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/esearch.fcgi?db=gene&term=1234[id]

In this case "1234[id]" means that we are searching for genes whose ID is 1234.