Issue 7 - October 2009

Gene Ontology development

The BHF-UCL team hosted a Heart Development Ontology Workshop at UCL in September. This was the first ontology workshop hosted by the BHF-UCL team and proved to be highly successful. Varsha had identified a lack of ontology terms in the heart development earlier in the year, while annotating genes involved in this process. Consequently, she invited 4 heart development experts, Peter Scambler, Paul Riley, Shoumo Bhattacharya and Ross Breckenridge as well as several GO curators from Cambridge and the US. 29 new heart development GO terms are now live in the GO and around 100 more are due to appear in the next few weeks. More information about this event is available through the agenda wiki page.

Meetings attended

Following a quiet summer, September has been a busy month, Ruth and Emily Dimmer, the GOA team coordinator at the EBI, gave an overview of 'Gene Ontology' at the British Atherosclerosis Society meeting in Cambridge. This was an excellent meeting and the session discussing Gene Ontology lasted almost an hour. The current limitations to the breadth of information that can be described using GO were discussed and the need to annotate genes with tissue and cell type specific information was highlighted by the participants. The following week Ruth and Varsha attended a three-day GO Consortium meeting, in Cambridge. At this meeting Varsha presented a summary of the Heart Development Ontology Workshop and Ruth summarised an ongoing discussion about how to best represent 'binding' in GO.