Wild Cards in Ontology Searches

The following wild card characters are available for Term Lookup searches of the controlled vocabulary terms.


Wild Cards in the Term Lookup search

Wild Card Matches Example Example Results
* 0 or more characters *phophatas* pyrophosphatase, hyphophosphatasia, etc.
. 1 character inositol-.,4 inositol-1,4, inositol-2,4, etc.



  • All Term Lookup searches are substring phrase searches


  • All words have an implicit wild card on each side for the Term Lookup search- partial terms can be used. Dashes, commas, and parentheses are ignored, so a search for "T-cell" is the same as a search for "T cell".


  • Term Lookup searches can be restricted to a specific controlled vocabulary hierarchy by providing the two letter hierarchy code in front of the search term. For example, a search for 'EX liver' will limit the search to the Expression hierarchy returning a single result, while a search for 'liver' will consider all hierarchies and return a larger set of results. Click here to view the list of hierarchy codes.


  • GO IDs and synonyms can be used for Term Lookup searches. For example, a search for "death" or "0006915" will return the term "BP: apoptosis".


  • Medical Subject Heading (MeSH) IDs and synonyms can be used for Disease searches. For example, a Disease search for "pancreatic cancer" or "D010190" will return the Disease View page "Pancreatic Neoplasms".


Copyright © geneXplain. All rights reserved.
Contact us at support@genexplain.com