The ConsensusPathDB is accessible via a web interface providing a variety of functions.

Using the web interface users can search for physical entities (e.g. proteins, metabolites etc.)

Using the web-interface of the database, one can perform overrepresentation analysis, based on biochemical pathways or on neighbourhood-based entity sets (NESTs) that constitute sub-networks of the overall interaction network containing all physical entities around a central one within a "radius" (number of interactions from the center).

For each predefined set (pathway / NEST), a P-value is computed based on the hypergeometric distribution.

It reflects the significance of the observed overlap between the user-specific input gene list and the members of the predefined set.