Center for Coomputational Molecular Biology & MPPB Joint Seminar
Abstract: The Gene Ontology (GO) provides a functional annotation system that standardizes and organizes the representation of what we understand about the molecular operations of cellular organisms. The complex GO hierarchy of carefully defined terms and explicit relationships between them supports curation of experimental and inferential assertions about the functioning and interactions of gene products such as proteins. The Mouse Genome Informatics (MGI) group, as part of the GO Consortium, curates mouse experimental data from the biomedical literature using the GO functional annotation system. MGI provides access to GO analysis tools, such as the GO Term Finder and VLAD, to statistically determine shared values for gene sets generated from high-throughput experiments such as microarray assays. The GO Reference Genome Project provides coordinated functional and comparative annotations for 12 primary model organisms. The comprehensive annotations of the well-studied model organisms provide broad and deep annotation of the reference genomes and serve as a basis for the annotation of emerging genomes via sequence similarity matrices. The use of shared homology/orthology sets and the incorporation of strict evolutionary inferences for downstream annotation supports robust assessment of functional networks for comparative genomic research. Recent use of the GO data sets to investigate comparative evolution for the homeo-domain proteins in mice (Mus) and plants (Arabidopsis) provide a demonstration of the power and promise of this work. All data sets and research tools generated by the GO and MGI Consortiums are freely available and distributed in a variety of formats. The Gene Ontology project is supported by NHGRI grant HG002273 to Principal Investigators Judith Blake, J. Michael Cherry, Suzanna Lewis, and Michael Ashburner. The Mouse Genome Informatics project is support by NHGRI grant HG-000330 to Principal Investigators Janan T. Eppig, Judith A. Blake, Carol J. Bult, Joel E. Richardson and James A. Kadin. Access Gene Ontology Consortium resources (www.geneontology.org). Access Mouse Genome Informatics resources (www.informatics.jax.org)
<--- 2008 Index