Help:Gene Ontology

Overview

The Gene Ontology (GO) is a collaborative effort to "standardize the representation of gene and gene product attributes across species and databases." It can be divided into three main areas: (1.) a controlled vocabulary of terms for the products of genes, (2.) a set of relationships between those terms such as (such as "is a", or "part of") and (3.) annotations about specific gene products from various species.

The wiki would like to capture as much information as possible in a way that is the most useful to other scientists. GO helps accomplish that task. On each Product page there is a table for GO annotations. The community encourages the addition of any information you could provide. Even if you are not familiar with GO that is fine, someone else can fill in the missing details later.

GO table

The GO tables on each of the Product pages contain all the GO annotations for that particular product. A quick overview of each of the columns is as such:

Qualifier

This is a term that is used to modify the interpretation of an annotation. For example an annotation that was found to be incorrect can have a "NOT" added as the qualifier.

GO ID

GO term name

Reference(s)

Evidence Code

with/from

Aspect

Notes

Status

The Ontology

The Gene Ontology is actually three ontologies:

More Information

The Gene Ontology website contains much helpful information. A few of the pages we find to be most informative are:

• GO Annotation Policies and Guidelines
• Annotation Conventions

See also

• The main Gene Ontology website - http://www.geneontology.org/
• GONUTS - A species-independent wiki for making annotations - http://gowiki.tamu.edu