Use and misuse of the gene ontology annotations.
The Gene Ontology (GO) project is a collaboration among model organism databases to describe gene products from all organisms using a consistent and computable language. GO produces sets of explicitly defined, structured vocabularies that describe biological processes, molecular functions and cellular components of gene products in both a computer- and human-readable manner. Here we describe key aspects of GO, which, when overlooked, can cause erroneous results, and address how these pitfalls can be avoided.
Rhee
Seung Yon
SY
Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, California 94305, USA. rhee@acoma.stanford.edu
Wood
Valerie
V
Dolinski
Kara
K
Draghici
Sorin
S
D019295:Computational Biology; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D006801:Humans; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D011506:Proteins / Q000235:genetics* / Q000378:metabolism*; D012984:Software
D011506:Proteins