Guidelines for Searching the Syllabus

• The search is always case-insensitive, so it does not matter whether you use capital or lower-case letters in your search phrase.
• If you want it to also ignore variations in spacing and punctuation, click on the check box labeled ignore spaces and punctuation. When you do this, searches for "10-year-old", "10 year old", or even "10yearold" are all equivalent.
• Except as noted above, the search looks for the entire sequence of characters you specify, consecutively and in order. Thus "10-year-old" is quite different from "ten-year-old".
• Currently, this preliminary search engine does not support Boolean operations like AND, OR, and NOT. If you type two or more words in the search box, you will only find places where those words occur together in the Syllabus as a single phrase, not separately.
• By default, your search phrase must match entire words in the Syllabus, where a word means letters and numbers separated by spaces or punctuation. For example, a search for "Hb D" would not find "Hb Dunn", but it would find "Hb D-Iran", because "D" and "Iran" count as separate words. If you want to find your search phrase even when it is embedded in longer words, check the match extended words box. This way "Hb D" will find "Hb Dunn", "oxy" will find both "oxygen" and "carboxypeptidase", and so forth. This is especially handy for including plurals and other minor variations in word endings. However, it also has the (usually unwanted) effect that "beta 1" will find "beta 12", "beta 106", etc., which is why this option is not the default. (Note that the words can only be extended at the beginning and/or end of your phrase, not in the middle. Thus a search for "cat exchange" will never find "cation exchange", nor will "Hb D" find "Hb F-Dickinson".)
• Using both check boxes together does work, but the results can be surprising. For example, a search for "thalassemias" finds "thalassemia splicing"!

Additional Options:

DATA FIELDS

The terms in this list are the "fields", or types of information, that can appear in each entry. Click on the check box to the left of one or more of them to select the ones that should be searched. (If you don't check any of these, the default is to search all of them.)

To see a sample entry for a particular field, click on its name. For instance, to see what kind of information appears in the Hb field, click on the text "Hb", and you will receive the following:

Hb S	beta6(A3)Glu->Val

Thus from this example it is evident that you can search for a variant's common name, residue number ("beta6", "beta109", etc.), or amino acids (wild-type, variant, or both; e.g., "Glu->Val"). This learn-by-example approach should serve as a guide to queries on any of the fields. (Most of the examples are from Hb S.)

HEMOGLOBIN CATEGORIES

Click on the check box to the left of one or more of these items to select the categories of variants that should be searched. (Again, if you don't check any, the default is to search all of them.)