SynGO Annotation Initiative

This project was focused on the curation of proteins located at the synapse.

Selection of TERT GO annotations

Link

This project ran from 2016-2018 and was part of an international collaboration, SynGO. It led to the manual annotation of proteins thought or known to play a role in the synapse through the application of Gene Ontology (GO) terms.

Manual curation is a time-consuming process but provides highly descriptive annotations. The UCL team in general takes a process-focused approach when prioritising which gene products to annotate. The advantage of a process-focused annotation approach is that it gives the curators time to fully understand the biological area they are annotating and consequently provide highly descriptive annotations. In addition, the curators request very descriptive GO terms, because they are keen to improve the annotation of this domain. Finally each paper is fully annotated, which may not happen when curators are taking a gene product focused approach.

Project focus

  • Training SynGO curators
  • Creating GO-CAM models of synaptic processes
  • Contributing new synaptic GO terms to the GO database and the SynGO subset


The work of the Functional Gene Annotation group 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.