Functional Gene Annotation

Biocuration captures biological knowledge and facilitates its integration into databases thereby making the data easily accessible for visualisation and analysis.

Selection of Gene Ontology terms relevant to neuron death

Lead: Professor Ruth Lovering

Biocurator: Katherine Thurlow

Students: Praoparn Asanitthong, Miao Long, Diana Luna Buitrago, Angeline Pesala, Yue Jiang

Volunteer biocurator: Marios Makris

We curate the scientific literature to provide;

Gene Ontology (GO) annotations to the GO Consortium

Protein interaction data to the IMEx Consortium

The gene product functional information we provide enables researchers to rapidly evaluate and interpret data and generate hypotheses to guide future research into cardiovascular and neurological processes and disease. To date the annotation team at UCL has provided 10% of the manual GO annotations associated with human gene products, and contributed to the creation of almost 3000 new GO terms. We are currently funded by Alzheimer's Research UK and we have previously been funded by the British Heart Foundation and Parkinson's UK to annotate proteins and microRNAs.

Contribute

You can email us to send information such as:

A review of the GO terms associated with your favourite gene and tell us what is missing or inaccurate - or let us know if we have done a good job
Suggestions of papers for curation

Lovering et al.The Functional Gene Annotation team is supported by Alzheimer's Research UK grant ARUK-NAS2017A-1 and the National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre. We support the work of the International Society for Biocuration (ISB).

Highlights

Presentation at the BHF student conference

Kan Yan Chloe Li was selected to present a poster for the annual 4-year BHF PhD Student Conference (16^th April 2021) which was virtually hosted by Queen Mary University of London this year. Her poster (available in our meetings webpage) was based on the work that she undertook with us during her first BHF PhD rotation project where she helped expand the available GO description of cardiac conduction system and heart development terms by creating over 150 new annotations for human proteins. The conference was a fantastic opportunity for her to share our work with other cardiovascular scientists and to learn about their interesting research!

Quarterly Functional Gene Annotation newsletter March 2021

Our latest Functional Gene Annotation newsletter is now available online. It provides a summary of our ARUK-funded GO annotation progress and the new student curators that have joined the group as well as information about specific Alzheimer's relevant annotations. In addition, collaborations with external groups have led to 2 recent publications.

Recent publication

Our recent publication describes the catagorisation of 1,500 DNA-binding transcription factors: Lovering et al. 2020.10.28.359232

Recent Publications

Lovering RC, Gaudet P, Acencio ML, Ignatchenko A, Jolma A, Fornes O, Kuiper M, Kulakovskiy IV, Laegreid A, Martin MJ, Logie C. A GO catalogue of human DNA-binding transcription factors. bioRxiv 2020 2020.10.28.359232.

RNAcentral Consortium. RNAcentral 2021: secondary structure integration, improved sequence search and new member databases. Nucleic Acids Res. 2020 Oct 27:gkaa921. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 33106848.

Wood V, Carbon S, Harris MA, Lock A, Engel SR, Hill DP, Van Auken K, Attrill H, Feuermann M, Gaudet P, Lovering RC, Poux S, Rutherford KM, Mungall CJ. Term Matrix: a novel Gene Ontology annotation quality control system based on ontology term co-annotation patterns. Open Biol. 2020 Sep;10(9):200149. PMID: 32875947.