List compare
Paste two or three lists of IDs, one per line. Overlap, unique entries and counts.
Paste two or three lists of IDs, one per line. Overlap, unique entries and counts.
Two lists of identifiers, one per line, split into three groups: the entries in both, the entries only in the first, and the entries only in the second. The overlap is the headline number because it is almost always the question, whether the lists are differentially expressed genes from two experiments, hits from two screens, a panel against a result, or two sets of sample IDs that ought to agree.
Each list is read as a set. Blank lines are ignored, an identifier repeated in the same list is counted once, and the result says how many repeats were collapsed. That matters more than it sounds: a list exported per transcript or per probe can hold the same gene five times, and counting it five times inflates both the list size and the overlap.
| Option | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Ignore case | on | TP53, Tp53 and tp53 are one identifier |
| Trim spaces | on | Leading and trailing whitespace is removed |
| Strip version suffix | off | ENSG00000141510.17 becomes ENSG00000141510 |
The entries are compared as text, exactly as given once those rules are applied. There is no synonym lookup: TP53 and P53 are two different identifiers here, and a symbol will never match an Ensembl or Entrez ID. Map both lists to the same identifier type before comparing them, or the overlap will be too small for a reason that has nothing to do with biology.
The example loads a 13-line list A of tumour-suppressor and oncogene symbols, in which TP53 appears twice in different case, and a 10-line list B. A collapses to 12 unique entries, and the comparison gives:
Switch to three lists and a 7-entry repair-gene panel C joins in. Now 2 entries are in all three, TP53 and PTEN; 3 more are in A and C only, 2 in A and B only, 1 in B and C only, and 19 different identifiers appear in total. Turn "Ignore case" off and list A has 13 unique entries instead of 12, because tp53 and TP53 stop being the same thing.
With two lists the circles are drawn to scale: each area is proportional to the size of its list and the circles are pushed together until the lens between them is proportional to the overlap, so the picture is a true two-set Venn diagram and not a decoration. Three circles cannot be drawn to scale and stay readable, so the three-list diagram uses the usual symmetric layout with the seven counts written in. Every count in the diagram is also a set you can copy under Details.
For sequences rather than identifiers, the FASTA deduplicator finds duplicate records in a file, and thesequence comparison tool compares two sequences base by base.
Paste one list in each box, one gene per line. The overlap, the entries in both lists, is the headline number, and the full membership of every set is behind Details with a copy button for each. Nothing is uploaded; the comparison runs in your browser.
Not by default. TP53, Tp53 and tp53 are treated as the same identifier, which is what you want when one list came from a mouse annotation and the other from a human one. Turn "Ignore case" off if you are comparing something where case is meaningful, such as protein isoform suffixes or case-sensitive sample names.
Each list is reduced to a set, so an identifier that appears twice in the same list is counted once, and the result says how many repeated lines were collapsed. That is almost always right for gene lists, where a duplicate usually comes from two probes or transcripts of the same gene rather than from two findings.
Yes, with "Strip version suffix" on. ENSG00000141510.17 and ENSG00000141510.2 both become ENSG00000141510 and match. The option removes a trailing full stop followed by digits, so it also handles versioned RefSeq and transcript identifiers, and leaves plain gene symbols alone.
This page counts the overlap; it does not test it. For a p-value you need the size of the universe the lists were drawn from, usually the number of genes measured, and a hypergeometric or Fisher exact test. The counts here, the two list sizes and the overlap, are three of the four numbers that test needs.