Gene Ontology Curation

The Gene Ontology (GO) is the established standard for the functional annotation of gene products. GO is a controlled vocabulary used to classify the following functional attributes of gene products:

• Biological Process (BP) terms describe the biological processes a gene product is involved in
• Molecular Function (MF) terms describe the activities and functions a gene product executes
• Cellular Component (CC) terms describe the subcellular or extracellular localisations of a gene product

The GO annotations are added directly to the Gene Ontology Annotation (GOA) database, at the European Bioinformatics Institute.

• View the annotations for LRRK2, an example of a comprehensively annotated protein

We are focused on the:

• Annotation of proteins
• Annotation of microRNAs
• Development of the ontology

Structure

GO terms are structured in a directed graphs (see figure), where each term has relationships to broader ‘parent’ terms or more specific ‘child’ terms. This hierarchical structure produces a representation of biology that allows for a greater amount of flexibility in data analysis than would be afforded by a format based on simple list of terms. The figure shows the QuickGO representation of the ancestral chart (Parent Ontology) for the term ‘heart development’.

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.