Category:CACAO

The Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies (CACAO) is 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 ran a pilot competition in the Spring of 2010 with 20 volunteer undergraduates from Texas A&M University. The competition was then set up as a multi-national competition in the Fall of 2010 with the addition of teams from University College London.

CACAO for Fall 2010

This image to the right illustrates the general logic behind the CACAO activity.

Over-reaching Learning Objective

The over-reaching learning objective 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 gene products (proteins or RNAs) did the specific things they describe?
3. What techniques did scientists use to characterize them?

CACAO Course Learning Objectives

CACAO Course Learning Objectives:

1. To critically analyze scientific papers and identify evidence for functional annotations.
2. seek information from online resources and add annotations to GONUTS.
3. formulate annotations using GO terminology while working effectively in a group.
4. evaluate peer-contributed annotations, construct challenges and prepare appropriate defenses.

Course Design

Below is the syllabus for the CACAO competition at Texas A&M University for Fall 2010. Students are taking this class for 1 hour of directed studies credit or are volunteering for no credit.

File:BICH 485 syllabus.pdf