The \Links\ directory contains link definition files containing templates for URLs to online tools for analyzing gene lists. EASE will detect two sets of one of the following strings in any given URL template:

[*EaseID*]

[*DATA*]

[*CONVERT*]

[*CLASS*]

... and construct the URL accordingly, replacing the [*EaseID*] string with the standard gene identifiers of the list to complete the URL. For example, if the URL template looks like:

http://david.niaid.nih.gov/david/ease.asp?locus=[*EaseID*];[*EaseID*]

EASE initializes the URL with:

http://david.niaid.nih.gov/david/ease.asp?locus=

and then concatenates all LocusLink numbers in the list with a semicolon and adds them to the end of the completed URL. In the cases of [*DATA*], [*CONVERT*], and [*CLASS*], EASE will first convert the list of genes to tags using a file specified on the second line of the link definition file located in the \Data\, \Data\Convert\, or \Data\Class\ directory respectively. For example, the

\Links\View Abstracts of PMIDs from LocusLink.txt

file contains the following lines:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&doptcmdl=Abstract&term=[*DATA*],[*DATA*]

Known PMIDs.txt

To link a given list of genes to this link named "View Abstracts of PMIDs from LocusLink", EASE first converts all LocusLink numbers of the gene list to PMID numbers using the file "Known PMIDs.txt" in the \Data\ directory. Then EASE initializes the URL with:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&doptcmdl=Abstract&term=

and then concatenates all of the PMID numbers with a comma and adds them to the end of the URL.