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:
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.)
Back to the Search page.