Overview of the Gene Ontology and Annotations

 TO BE REVIEWED 
 This is a mix of a number of older pages and presentations, including the presentation that Suzi L, Paul and Pascale did at the BC2 meeting in 2017
 Need to also check redundancy with http://geneontology.org/docs/go-annotations/

An ontology of Gene Function

The Gene Ontology is a "vocabulary" of gene functions, that contains classes representing biological concepts, and relationships between these concepts.

• Classes: Each representing a biology entity
• Relations: How different entities relate to one another
• Each concept has two definitions:
  • human-readable
  • logical, i.e. relative to the other concepts. Logical definitions are computable.

GO annotations

An annotation is a statement linking a gene to some aspect of its function (a GO ontology term). Annotations describe:

• How a gene functions at the molecular level
• Where in the cell a gene functions
• What biological processes (pathways, programs) a gene helps to carry out

• Each annotation must be based on evidence, which is recorded as part of the annotation
  • Evidence code (type of evidence)
  • Reference (published journal article)

Together, the ontology and the annotations make a model of biological knowledge.