Guidelines for literature-based curation

Literature based/Manual GO annotations

Annotation is the process of assigning GO terms to gene products. Annotations can be made either from published literature or manually by comparing sequences or can be inferred using automated methods. Literature based annotations are from published papers and inferring annotations from them is very time-consuming but produces very high quality, species-specific annotation, and brings the information about the gene product into a format in which it can be used in high-throughput experiments. This is an extremely worthwhile process in the long term. It may be best carried out by people who know the function of the gene product, and the associated biology, in great detail; for example experimental scientists who are familiar with the published literature. If you are doing this, then you may like to write and suggest modifications to the ontology structure as well.

Key aspects of literature based annotations

The most difficult task in doing literature based annotations is in figuring out the correct GO term and the evidence code to use in the annotation. The GOC has come up with several guidelines to help curators map the data/results presented in the paper to the right GO term and GO evidence code.