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Automating the construction of gene ontologies

Nature Biotechnology volume 31, pages 34–35 (2013)Cite this article

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Manual curation of biological ontologies is recapitulated by an algorithmic approach, supplementing the Gene Ontology and enabling the discovery of relationships among genes and proteins.

For nearly all functional-genomics studies, the Gene Ontology (GO) is an indispensable resource. GO was built by hand, yet it has always been clear that a scalable, automated approach would eventually be required because of the size and complexity of the ontology; today it contains >34,000 terms and >64,000 relationships among them. In this issue, Dutkowski et al.1 report the first algorithmic method for generating an ontology de novo from genomics data, including gene expression and genetic and physical interaction studies. With this work, we see the beginning of a truly scalable system for annotating relationships among genes and proteins.

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References

  1. Dutkowski, J. et al. Nat. Biotechnol. 30, 38–45 (2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kara Dolinski is at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.,

    Kara Dolinski

  2. David Botstein is at the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics and the Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.,

    David Botstein

Authors
  1. Kara Dolinski
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  2. David Botstein
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to David Botstein.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Dolinski, K., Botstein, D. Automating the construction of gene ontologies. Nat Biotechnol 31, 34–35 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2476

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2476

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