Competition

Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies Competition

The Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies (CACAO) is a multi-institution competition for teams of undergraduate students around the world to improve GO annotation of genes.

Manual annotation is a time-consuming and costly process, requiring trained curators. With this in mind, the CACAO competition (developed and organised by Texas A&M University) trains large numbers of undergrads in GO annotation, within a friendly and fun, competitive environment.

CACAO teaches students how to read scientific literature and make correct, high-quality annotations. In CACAO, student teams get points for making correct annotations, but can also 'steal' points from competing teams for spotting incorrect annotations.

UCL entrants into previous CACAO competition rounds are listed below:

Amy Hong	Autumn 2010
Athina Dritsoula	Autumn 2010
Dipali Patel	Autumn 2010
Louisa Steel	Autumn 2010
Coralea Stephanou	Autumn 2010
Sejal Patel	Autumn 2011
Caroline Smith	Autumn 2011
Tamieka Whyte	Autumn 2011
Hessa Almasoud	Autumn 2011

The work of the Cardiovascular Gene Annotation group is supported by British Heart Foundation grant RG/13/5/30112. The work of the Neurological Gene Annotation group is supported by Alzheimer's Research UK grant ARUK-NSG2016-13. The Functional Gene Annotation team is supported by the National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre.

Highlights

Ruth Lovering Resignation

Although I resigned at the end of August 2023, I am still working through the GO annotations that need to be revised (due to a change in the GO Consortium guidelines). In addition, I have been invited to provide a few lectures at UCL and I have a few papers to complete. Thank you again to the British Heart Foundation, Alzheimer Research UK and Parkinson's UK for their funding and thank you to all of the scientists and members of the GO consortium that have collaborated with the Functional Annotation team. Most importantly, thank you to all the biocurators who joined the team, you were a pleasure to work with and made an amazing impact on the GO annotation of human gene products.

Recent Publications

Luna Buitrago, D.; Lovering, R.C.; Caporali, A. Insights into Online microRNA Bioinformatics Tools. Non-Coding RNA2023, 9, 18.
Lovering RC, Gaudet P, Acencio ML, Ignatchenko A, Jolma A, Fornes O, Kuiper M, Kulakovskiy IV, Lægreid A, Martin MJ, Logie C. A GO catalogue of human DNA-binding transcription factors. Biochim Biophys Acta Gene Regul Mech. 2021 1864(11-12):194765. PMID: 34673265.

Contact details

Rayne Building, 5 University Street, London. WC1E 6JF

Professor Ruth Lovering r.lovering@ucl.ac.uk
URL: www.ucl.ac.uk/functional-gene-annotation