Look up gene name aliases

Exact-name lookup uses the symbols in your annotation. To search aliases and previous human symbols too, load the HGNC complete set with one call. PyEnsembl downloads it once and reuses the cached file:

from pyensembl import EnsemblRelease, GeneNameAliases

data = EnsemblRelease(93, species="human")  # install this release first
aliases = GeneNameAliases.download_hgnc()
genes = data.genes_by_name("p53", aliases=aliases)
print([gene.name for gene in genes])
data.close()

['TP53']

Names are case-sensitive, including HGNC's lowercase p53 alias. Alias data is human-only and comes from HGNC independently of Ensembl. Only genes present in the annotation are returned, with their original IDs. Ambiguous aliases return all matching genes, including exact-name matches; do not assume the first one is the intended locus. gene_ids_of_gene_name(..., aliases=aliases) returns just the IDs.

Reuse or select a snapshot

Cached aliases work offline. They are stored under aliases/homo_sapiens/hgnc in the PyEnsembl cache. Use cache_directory_path= to choose another directory, or overwrite=True to refresh the current complete set explicitly.

For reproducible work, keep the snapshot with your analysis. Current HGNC names can differ from an older Ensembl release. Load a selected local snapshot with GeneNameAliases.from_hgnc("hgnc_complete_set.txt"), or pass an archived HGNC TSV URL as source_url= to download_hgnc(). Plain and gzip TSV files are supported.

Other species or custom names

Pass your own name-to-gene-ID mapping, for example data.genes_by_name("old_name", aliases={"old_name": ["gene_id"]}).