Reference "Creating the gene ontology resource: design and implementation"

Reference ID

6904

Title

Creating the gene ontology resource: design and implementation

Source

Genome research, 2001, vol. 11, pp. 1425-1433

Author (0)

Abstract

The exponential growth in the volume of accessible biological information has
generated a confusion of voices surrounding the annotation of molecular
information about genes and their products. The Gene Ontology (GO) project seeks
to provide a set of structured vocabularies for specific biological domains that
can be used to describe gene products in any organism. This work includes
building three extensive ontologies to describe molecular function, biological
process, and cellular component, and providing a community database resource
that supports the use of these ontologies. The GO Consortium was initiated by
scientists associated with three model organism databases: SGD, the
Saccharomyces Genome database; FlyBase, the Drosophila genome database; and
MGD/GXD, the Mouse Genome Informatics databases. Additional model organism
database groups are joining the project. Each of these model organism
information systems is annotating genes and gene products using GO vocabulary
terms and incorporating these annotations into their respective model organism
databases. Each database contributes its annotation files to a shared GO data
resource accessible to the public at http://www.geneontology.org/. The GO site
can be used by the community both to recover the GO vocabularies and to access
the annotated gene product data sets from the model organism databases. The GO
Consortium supports the development of the GO database resource and provides
tools enabling curators and researchers to query and manipulate the
vocabularies. We believe that the shared development of this molecular
annotation resource will contribute to the unification of biological
information.