Abstract

The Gene Ontology (GO) project is a collaboration among model organism databases to describe gene products from all organisms using a consistent and computable language. GO produces sets of explicitly defined, structured vocabularies that describe biological processes, molecular functions and cellular components of gene products in both a computer- and human-readable manner. Here we describe key aspects of GO, which, when overlooked, can cause erroneous results, and address how these pitfalls can be avoided.

Author affiliations

1. Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology, 260 Panama Street, Stanford, California 94305, USA.
2. Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge CB10 1SA, UK.
3. Lewis–Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Carl Icahn Laboratory, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey 08544, USA.
4. Wayne State University, Department of Computer Science, 5,143 Cass Ave, Room 431 State Hall, Detroit, Michigan, 48202, USA.
5. All authors contributed equally to this work.

Correspondence to: Seung Yon Rhee¹ Email: rhee@acoma.stanford.edu

Correspondence to: Sorin Draghici⁴ Email: sod@cs.wayne.edu

Published online 13 May 2008

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