The Gene Ontology (GO) database and informatics resource.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Harris MA
PROVIDER: S-EPMC308770 | biostudies-literature | 2004 Jan
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
Publications
The Gene Ontology (GO) database and informatics resource.
Harris M A MA Clark J J Ireland A A Lomax J J Ashburner M M Foulger R R Eilbeck K K Lewis S S Marshall B B Mungall C C Richter J J Rubin G M GM Blake J A JA Bult C C Dolan M M Drabkin H H Eppig J T JT Hill D P DP Ni L L Ringwald M M Balakrishnan R R Cherry J M JM Christie K R KR Costanzo M C MC Dwight S S SS Engel S S Fisk D G DG Hirschman J E JE Hong E L EL Nash R S RS Sethuraman A A Theesfeld C L CL Botstein D D Dolinski K K Feierbach B B Berardini T T Mundodi S S Rhee S Y SY Apweiler R R Barrell D D Camon E E Dimmer E E Lee V V Chisholm R R Gaudet P P Kibbe W W Kishore R R Schwarz E M EM Sternberg P P Gwinn M M Hannick L L Wortman J J Berriman M M Wood V V de la Cruz N N Tonellato P P Jaiswal P P Seigfried T T White R R
Nucleic acids research 20040101 Database issue
The Gene Ontology (GO) project (http://www. geneontology.org/) provides structured, controlled vocabularies and classifications that cover several domains of molecular and cellular biology and are freely available for community use in the annotation of genes, gene products and sequences. Many model organism databases and genome annotation groups use the GO and contribute their annotation sets to the GO resource. The GO database integrates the vocabularies and contributed annotations and provides ...[more]
Similar Datasets
Project description:Gene Ontology (GO) has been widely used to infer functional significance associated with sets of genes in order to automate discoveries within large-scale genetic studies. A level in GO's direct acyclic graph structure is often assumed to be indicative of its terms' specificities, although other work has suggested this assumption does not hold. Unfortunately, quantitative analysis of biological functions based on nodes at the same level (as is common in gene enrichment analysis tools) can lead to incorrect conclusions as well as missed discoveries due to inefficient use of available information. This paper addresses these using an informational theoretic approach encoded in the GO Partition Database that guarantees to maximize information for gene enrichment analysis. The GO Partition Database was designed to feature ontology partitions with GO terms of similar specificity. The GO partitions comprise varying numbers of nodes and present relevant information theoretic statistics, so researchers can choose to analyze datasets at arbitrary levels of specificity. The GO Partition Database, featuring GO partition sets for functional analysis of genes from human and 10 other commonly studied organisms with a total of 131,972 genes, is available on the internet at: bcl.med.harvard.edu/proj/gopart. The site also includes an online tutorial.
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Project description:The Gene Ontology Annotation (GOA) project at the EBI (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/goa) provides high-quality electronic and manual associations (annotations) of Gene Ontology (GO) terms to UniProt Knowledgebase (UniProtKB) entries. Annotations created by the project are collated with annotations from external databases to provide an extensive, publicly available GO annotation resource. Currently covering over 160 000 taxa, with greater than 32 million annotations, GOA remains the largest and most comprehensive open-source contributor to the GO Consortium (GOC) project. Over the last five years, the group has augmented the number and coverage of their electronic pipelines and a number of new manual annotation projects and collaborations now further enhance this resource. A range of files facilitate the download of annotations for particular species, and GO term information and associated annotations can also be viewed and downloaded from the newly developed GOA QuickGO tool (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/QuickGO), which allows users to precisely tailor their annotation set.
| S-EPMC2686469 | biostudies-literature
Project description:BackgroundAutomated comparison of complete sets of genes encoded in two genomes can provide insight on the genetic basis of differences in biological traits between species. Gene ontology (GO) is used as a common vocabulary to annotate genes for comparison. Current approaches calculate the fold of unweighted or weighted differences between two species at the high-level GO functional categories. However, to ensure the reliability of the differences detected, it is important to evaluate their statistical significance. It is also useful to search for differences at all levels of GO.ResultsWe propose a statistical approach to find reliable differences between the complete sets of genes encoded in two genomes at all levels of GO. The genes are first assigned GO terms from BLAST searches against genes with known GO assignments, and for each GO term the abundance of genes in the two genomes is compared using a chi-squared test followed by false discovery rate (FDR) correction. We applied this method to find statistically significant differences between two cyanobacteria, Synechocystis sp. PCC6803 and Anabaena sp. PCC7120. We then studied how the set of identified differences vary when different BLAST cutoffs are used. We also studied how the results vary when only subsets of the genes were used in the comparison of human vs. mouse and that of Saccharomyces cerevisiae vs. Schizosaccharomyces pombe.ConclusionThere is a surprising lack of statistical approaches for comparing complete genomes at all levels of GO. With the rapid increase of the number of sequenced genomes, we hope that the approach we proposed and tested can make valuable contribution to comparative genomics.
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Project description:The Gene Ontology (GO) (http://www.geneontology.org/) contains a set of terms for describing the activity and actions of gene products across all kingdoms of life. Each of these activities is executed in a location within a cell or in the vicinity of a cell. In order to capture this context, the GO includes a sub-ontology called the Cellular Component (CC) ontology (GO-CCO). The primary use of this ontology is for GO annotation, but it has also been used for phenotype annotation, and for the annotation of images. Another ontology with similar scope to the GO-CCO is the Subcellular Anatomy Ontology (SAO), part of the Neuroscience Information Framework Standard (NIFSTD) suite of ontologies. The SAO also covers cell components, but in the domain of neuroscience.Recently, the GO-CCO was enriched in content and links to the Biological Process and Molecular Function branches of GO as well as to other ontologies. This was achieved in several ways. We carried out an amalgamation of SAO terms with GO-CCO ones; as a result, nearly 100 new neuroscience-related terms were added to the GO. The GO-CCO also contains relationships to GO Biological Process and Molecular Function terms, as well as connecting to external ontologies such as the Cell Ontology (CL). Terms representing protein complexes in the Protein Ontology (PRO) reference GO-CCO terms for their species-generic counterparts. GO-CCO terms can also be used to search a variety of databases.In this publication we provide an overview of the GO-CCO, its overall design, and some recent extensions that make use of additional spatial information. One of the most recent developments of the GO-CCO was the merging in of the SAO, resulting in a single unified ontology designed to serve the needs of GO annotators as well as the specific needs of the neuroscience community.
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Project description:Plant phenology - the timing of plant life-cycle events, such as flowering or leafing out - plays a fundamental role in the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems, including human agricultural systems. Because plant phenology is often linked with climatic variables, there is widespread interest in developing a deeper understanding of global plant phenology patterns and trends. Although phenology data from around the world are currently available, truly global analyses of plant phenology have so far been difficult because the organizations producing large-scale phenology data are using non-standardized terminologies and metrics during data collection and data processing. To address this problem, we have developed the Plant Phenology Ontology (PPO). The PPO provides the standardized vocabulary and semantic framework that is needed for large-scale integration of heterogeneous plant phenology data. Here, we describe the PPO, and we also report preliminary results of using the PPO and a new data processing pipeline to build a large dataset of phenology information from North America and Europe.
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Project description:The Gene Ontology Annotation (GOA) database (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/GOA) aims to provide high-quality electronic and manual annotations to the UniProt Knowledgebase (Swiss-Prot, TrEMBL and PIR-PSD) using the standardized vocabulary of the Gene Ontology (GO). As a supplementary archive of GO annotation, GOA promotes a high level of integration of the knowledge represented in UniProt with other databases. This is achieved by converting UniProt annotation into a recognized computational format. GOA provides annotated entries for nearly 60,000 species (GOA-SPTr) and is the largest and most comprehensive open-source contributor of annotations to the GO Consortium annotation effort. By integrating GO annotations from other model organism groups, GOA consolidates specialized knowledge and expertise to ensure the data remain a key reference for up-to-date biological information. Furthermore, the GOA database fully endorses the Human Proteomics Initiative by prioritizing the annotation of proteins likely to benefit human health and disease. In addition to a non-redundant set of annotations to the human proteome (GOA-Human) and monthly releases of its GO annotation for all species (GOA-SPTr), a series of GO mapping files and specific cross-references in other databases are also regularly distributed. GOA can be queried through a simple user-friendly web interface or downloaded in a parsable format via the EBI and GO FTP websites. The GOA data set can be used to enhance the annotation of particular model organism or gene expression data sets, although increasingly it has been used to evaluate GO predictions generated from text mining or protein interaction experiments. In 2004, the GOA team will build on its success and will continue to supplement the functional annotation of UniProt and work towards enhancing the ability of scientists to access all available biological information. Researchers wishing to query or contribute to the GOA project are encouraged to email: goa@ebi.ac.uk.
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Project description:BackgroundThe increased accessibility of gene expression tools has enabled a wide variety of experiments utilizing transcriptomic analyses. As these tools increase in prevalence, the need for improved standardization in processing and presentation of data increases, as does the need to guard against interpretation bias. Gene Ontology (GO) analysis is a powerful method of interpreting and summarizing biological functions. However, while there are many tools available to investigate GO enrichment, there remains a need for methods that directly remove redundant terms from enriched GO lists that often provide little, if any, additional information.FindingsHere we present a simple yet novel method called GO Trimming that utilizes an algorithm designed to reduce redundancy in lists of enriched GO categories. Depending on the needs of the user, this method can be performed with variable stringency. In the example presented here, an initial list of 90 terms was reduced to 54, eliminating 36 largely redundant terms. We also compare this method to existing methods and find that GO Trimming, while simple, performs well to eliminate redundant terms in a large dataset throughout the depth of the GO hierarchy.ConclusionsThe GO Trimming method provides an alternative to other procedures, some of which involve removing large numbers of terms prior to enrichment analysis. This method should free up the researcher from analyzing overly large, redundant lists, and instead enable the concise presentation of manageable, informative GO lists. The implementation of this tool is freely available at: http://lucy.ceh.uvic.ca/go_trimming/cbr_go_trimming.py.
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Project description:BACKGROUND: Superoxide reductases (SOR) catalyse the reduction of superoxide anions to hydrogen peroxide and are involved in the oxidative stress defences of anaerobic and facultative anaerobic organisms. Genes encoding SOR were discovered recently and suffer from annotation problems. These genes, named sor, are short and the transfer of annotations from previously characterized neelaredoxin, desulfoferrodoxin, superoxide reductase and rubredoxin oxidase has been heterogeneous. Consequently, many sor remain anonymous or mis-annotated. DESCRIPTION: SORGOdb is an exhaustive database of SOR that proposes a new classification based on domain architecture. SORGOdb supplies a simple user-friendly web-based database for retrieving and exploring relevant information about the proposed SOR families. The database can be queried using an organism name, a locus tag or phylogenetic criteria, and also offers sequence similarity searches using BlastP. Genes encoding SOR have been re-annotated in all available genome sequences (prokaryotic and eukaryotic (complete and in draft) genomes, updated in May 2010). CONCLUSIONS: SORGOdb contains 325 non-redundant and curated SOR, from 274 organisms. It proposes a new classification of SOR into seven different classes and allows biologists to explore and analyze sor in order to establish correlations between the class of SOR and organism phenotypes. SORGOdb is freely available at http://sorgo.genouest.org/index.php.
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Project description:The Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC) provides the most comprehensive resource currently available for computable knowledge regarding the functions of genes and gene products. Here, we report the advances of the consortium over the past two years. The new GO-CAM annotation framework was notably improved, and we formalized the model with a computational schema to check and validate the rapidly increasing repository of 2838 GO-CAMs. In addition, we describe the impacts of several collaborations to refine GO and report a 10% increase in the number of GO annotations, a 25% increase in annotated gene products, and over 9,400 new scientific articles annotated. As the project matures, we continue our efforts to review older annotations in light of newer findings, and, to maintain consistency with other ontologies. As a result, 20 000 annotations derived from experimental data were reviewed, corresponding to 2.5% of experimental GO annotations. The website (http://geneontology.org) was redesigned for quick access to documentation, downloads and tools. To maintain an accurate resource and support traceability and reproducibility, we have made available a historical archive covering the past 15 years of GO data with a consistent format and file structure for both the ontology and annotations.
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Project description:The exponential growth in the volume of accessible biological information has generated a confusion of voices surrounding the annotation of molecular information about genes and their products. The Gene Ontology (GO) project seeks to provide a set of structured vocabularies for specific biological domains that can be used to describe gene products in any organism. This work includes building three extensive ontologies to describe molecular function, biological process, and cellular component, and providing a community database resource that supports the use of these ontologies. The GO Consortium was initiated by scientists associated with three model organism databases: SGD, the Saccharomyces Genome database; FlyBase, the Drosophila genome database; and MGD/GXD, the Mouse Genome Informatics databases. Additional model organism database groups are joining the project. Each of these model organism information systems is annotating genes and gene products using GO vocabulary terms and incorporating these annotations into their respective model organism databases. Each database contributes its annotation files to a shared GO data resource accessible to the public at http://www.geneontology.org/. The GO site can be used by the community both to recover the GO vocabularies and to access the annotated gene product data sets from the model organism databases. The GO Consortium supports the development of the GO database resource and provides tools enabling curators and researchers to query and manipulate the vocabularies. We believe that the shared development of this molecular annotation resource will contribute to the unification of biological information.
| S-EPMC311077 | biostudies-literature