title: Use and misuse of the gene ontology annotations.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, California 94305, USA. rhee@acoma.stanford.edu
authors.forename: Seung Yon
authors.initials: SY
authors.lastname: Rhee
authors.forename: Valerie
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Wood
authors.forename: Kara
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Dolinski
authors.forename: Sorin
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Draghici
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D006801:Humans; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D011506:Proteins / Q000235:genetics* / Q000378:metabolism*; D012984:Software
chemical_list: D011506:Proteins