Cardiovascular Gene Ontology Annotation Initiative

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 will be holding our sixth GO workshop, 18-19th April 2013.  If you wish to attend, please register online.

The Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies (CACAO) Created annotations to human gene products by taking part in the Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies (CACAO) competition held at Texas A&M, as part of a UCL based annotation team.

UCL has submitted MSc student teams to the competition since September 2010.

Previous CACAO entrants

Understanding bioinformatics resources and their application

This masters level module for the UCL Genetics Institute's MSc in Genetics of Human Disease has been developed and organised by the BHF-UCL team.

The module covers a variety of essential online genomic and proteomic resources and introduces Gene Ontology, gene regulation and protein structure. Students gain experience in using these online resources and in the review of the scientific literature.

The contribution of experts to the development of the Gene Ontology terms is invaluable.  The BHF-UCL team have initiated several major ontology improvements, and have been fortunate to have had the assistance of several expert researchers for each of these projects.  We thank the following people for being so generous with their time in order to help refine the Gene Ontology.

Listed by topic and in alphabetical order: