title: The what, where, how and why of gene ontology--a primer for bioinformaticians.
abstract: With high-throughput technologies providing vast amounts of data, it has become more important to provide systematic, quality annotations. The Gene Ontology (GO) project is the largest resource for cataloguing gene function. Nonetheless, its use is not yet ubiquitous and is still fraught with pitfalls. In this review, we provide a short primer to the GO for bioinformaticians. We summarize important aspects of the structure of the ontology, describe sources and types of functional annotations, survey measures of GO annotation similarity, review typical uses of GO and discuss other important considerations pertaining to the use of GO in bioinformatics applications.
authors.affiliation: ETH Zurich, Computer Science, Universitätstr. 6, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Louis
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: du Plessis
authors.forename: Nives
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Skunca
authors.forename: Christophe
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Dessimoz
mesh_terms: D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods*; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D005796:Genes; D058977:Molecular Sequence Annotation; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled