Annotation Workshops

The Cardiovascular GO Annotation Initiative is committed to ensuring comprehensive annotation of genes involved in cardiovascular processes and promotion of the Gene Ontology to cardiovascular scientists. To promote our work, and to increase awareness of the GO curation process amongst bench scientists, we have designed an annotation workshop.

Course Description

The Gene Ontology Annotation Workshop is open to all biological or biomedical UCL PhD and Post-Doc research scientists. Attending the course will boost your understanding of bioinformatics resources and their use. In addition you will have the opportunity to improve the profile of your papers in the world’s leading biological databases, such as EntrezGene, UniProt and GeneCards.

The aim of Gene Ontology (GO) annotation is to ensure that the investment in genome sequencing, along with the accumulated knowledge of a range of biological systems can be exploited to the full, to benefit researchers seeking to understand the complex interactions between multiple gene products. The UCL GO annotation group primarily focuses on the annotation of human proteins associated with specific aspects of human biology. Through our close relationship with research scientists we provide informative and specific protein annotations that support research projects worldwide.

This workshop aims to provide information about GO and other bioinformatic resources to research scientists throughout UCL and to encourage their participation in the process of gene annotation. Attendees are required to bring published experimental data (their own or in their area of interest) for annotation. In addition this workshop will provide practical demonstrations of a number of freely available high-throughput analysis tools that can be used for the analysis of large datasets, such as those derived from proteomic or microarray methodologies. Attendees may bring in their own datasets for analysis.

Annotations created during this workshop will be added to the GOA database at EBI and will be incorporated, through existing pipelines, into all of the major biological knowledgebases, such as EntrezGene, Ensembl, UniProt and GeneCards. In addition these annotations will be available for use by the majority of high-throughput analysis tools.

Previous workshops

We have been running the GO workshop twice a year since September 2010.  Previous attendees have commented:

"The workshop was a positive and enjoyable experience'. 

"I have used ENSEMBL for years, but I didn't know about that!" (aligning features on Ensembl)

"I learned new things about programs that I use, and also about new programs."

"Yes, very useful, and also let you know what the limitations of the databases are and how we can use them"

In addition attendees have stated that they would recommend this course to their colleagues.

Forthcoming workshops

We are holding our fourth workshop 24-25th April 2012.  If you would like a place at this workshop, please book online.

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The work of the Cardiovascular Gene Ontology Annotation group is supported by British Heart Foundation grant SP/07/007/23671