Gene Ontology
The Gene Ontology (GO) project is a major bioinformatics initiative with the aim of standardizing the representation of gene and gene product attributes across species and databases. The project provides a controlled vocabulary of terms for describing gene product characteristics and gene product annotation data from GO Consortium members, as well as tools to access and process this data.
The GO project has developed three structured controlled vocabularies (ontologies) that describe gene products in terms of their associated biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions in a species-independent manner. There are three separate aspects to this effort: first, the development and maintenance of the ontologies themselves; second, the annotation of gene products, which entails making associations between the ontologies and the genes and gene products in the collaborating databases; and third, development of tools that facilitate the creation, maintenance and use of ontologies.
When GO database is installed in BioUML, the following classification hubs can be registered:
- GO (biological process)
- GO (molecular function)
- GO (cellular component)
- Full gene ontology classification
