Category:CACAO

The Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies (CACAO) is being developed at Texas A&M as a competition for teams of undergrads around the world to improve the functional annotation of genes.

The rapid advances in genomics technology mean that we are discovering genes faster than we can figure out what they do. For most new sequences, gene function will be inferred by comparison with well-studied model systems such as E. coli. This means that the quality of functional annotation for these models is very important for the future of biology.

We're currently looking for volunteers to help us with CACAO in Fall 2010.

For information about past rounds of CACAO, see the pages in this category.

CACAO for Fall 2010

This image is about the general logic behind the activity.

The over-reaching goal is to help students understand:

1. Where does our knowledge come from?
2. How did the authors of textbooks or review papers know that certain proteins did the specific things they describe?
3. How do we actually know that the ribosome consists of proteins and RNA molecules?
4. How did scientists identify them?
5. What techniques can be used to characterize gene products?

Course Design