Manual Gene Ontology annotation workflow at the Mouse Genome Informatics Database

To increase the utility of Gene Ontology (GO) annotations for interpretation of genome-wide experimental data, we have developed GO-CAM, a structured framework for linking multiple GO annotations into an integrated model of a biological system. We expect that GO-CAM will enable new applications in pathway and network analysis, as well as improve standard GO annotations for traditional GO-based applications.

BackgroundA large volume of data and information about genes and gene products has been stored in various molecular biology databases. A major challenge for knowledge discovery using these databases is to identify related genes and gene products in disparate databases. The development of Gene Ontology (GO) as a common vocabulary for annotation allows integrated queries across multiple databases and identification of semantically related genes and gene products (i.e., genes and gene products that have similar GO annotations). Meanwhile, dozens of tools have been developed for browsing, mining or editing GO terms, their hierarchical relationships, or their "associated" genes and gene products (i.e., genes and gene products annotated with GO terms). Tools that allow users to directly search and inspect relations among all GO terms and their associated genes and gene products from multiple databases are needed.ResultsWe present a standalone package called DynGO, which provides several advanced functionalities in addition to the standard browsing capability of the official GO browsing tool (AmiGO). DynGO allows users to conduct batch retrieval of GO annotations for a list of genes and gene products, and semantic retrieval of genes and gene products sharing similar GO annotations. The result are shown in an association tree organized according to GO hierarchies and supported with many dynamic display options such as sorting tree nodes or changing orientation of the tree. For GO curators and frequent GO users, DynGO provides fast and convenient access to GO annotation data. DynGO is generally applicable to any data set where the records are annotated with GO terms, as illustrated by two examples.ConclusionWe have presented a standalone package DynGO that provides functionalities to search and browse GO and its association databases as well as several additional functions such as batch retrieval and semantic retrieval. The complete documentation and software are freely available for download from the website .

Improvements to cardiovascular Gene Ontology

The set of annotations at the Saccharomyces Genome Database (SGD) that classifies the cellular function of S. cerevisiae gene products using Gene Ontology (GO) terms has become an important resource for facilitating experimental analysis. In addition to capturing and summarizing experimental results, the structured nature of GO annotations allows for functional comparison across organisms as well as propagation of functional predictions between related gene products. Due to their relevance to many areas of research, ensuring the accuracy and quality of these annotations is a priority at SGD. GO annotations are assigned either manually, by biocurators extracting experimental evidence from the scientific literature, or through automated methods that leverage computational algorithms to predict functional information. Here, we discuss the relationship between literature-based and computationally predicted GO annotations in SGD and extend a strategy whereby comparison of these two types of annotation identifies genes whose annotations need review. Our method, CvManGO (Computational versus Manual GO annotations), pairs literature-based GO annotations with computational GO predictions and evaluates the relationship of the two terms within GO, looking for instances of discrepancy. We found that this method will identify genes that require annotation updates, taking an important step towards finding ways to prioritize literature review. Additionally, we explored factors that may influence the effectiveness of CvManGO in identifying relevant gene targets to find in particular those genes that are missing literature-supported annotations, but our survey found that there are no immediately identifiable criteria by which one could enrich for these under-annotated genes. Finally, we discuss possible ways to improve this strategy, and the applicability of this method to other projects that use the GO for curation.Database URL:http://www.yeastgenome.org

The Gene Ontology (GO) provides a framework to systematically classify and annotate gene function. The annotations associated with GO play a critical role in modern biology and cover many organisms. For the human genome, over 10,000 GO terms are used to annotate gene function in an expansive database of over 200,000 annotations. Due to the importance of the GO annotations in modern biology, significant effort has been put into assessing the quality of the annotations. Providing measures of annotation completeness, accuracy, and precision is critical if researchers are to use the annotations in real-world applications with confidence. Here, we describe a task-based approach that examines the completeness and utility of GO annotations through the lens of gene enrichment analysis. Our approach can be used to model the progression of the GO annotations over time, either for a particular area of interest or for the body of annotations as a whole. Using this framework, we conducted a large-scale analysis of gene expression datasets from the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO). In particular, we identified terms of interest for each dataset through semantic annotation of biomedical data, then tracked the behavior of these terms as a function of time. The preliminary results provide significant information about the progress and character of GO annotations over time. This framework is flexible enough to examine all or part of the GO annotations, across multiple species, and with various enrichment methods. We also discuss how this framework can be used to evaluate different annotation methods. For example, by comparing the performance of annotations generated with a particular method to the performance of canonical annotations, it is possible to determine their relative quality.

Introduction. Ontologies as knowledgebases have been heavily applied in computational biological studies by implementing into ML models for purposes such as disease-gene associations identification. Method. We conduct a case study using gene ontology (GO) annotation data and three ML models to replicate the prediction of autism spectrum disorder (ASD)-causing genes. Analysis. Data were collected from GO and Simmons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI). The semantic similarities between GO annotation terms on gene products were calculated. Results. The best-performing model can reach an AUC of .85, which means using GO annotation data for ASD disease-gene prediction can receive a significantly accurate result. However, we stress the importance of constructing knowledgebases in adapting to LLMs and the role of LIS professionals in curating community knowledge for interoperability and reuse. Conclusions. Biomedical ontologies play a crucial role in the discovery of biomedical knowledge. Knowledge organization and computer science domains require more communication and synchronization in the face of emerging AI and ML technologies.

There has been an explosion of interest in the role of mitochondria in programmed cell death and other fundamental pathological processes underlying the development of human diseases. Nevertheless, the inventory of mitochondrial proteins encoded in the nuclear genome remains incomplete, providing an impediment to mitochondrial research at the interface with systems biology. We created the MiGenes database to further define the scope of the mitochondrial proteome in humans and model organisms including mice, rats, flies and worms as well as budding and fission yeasts. MiGenes is intended to stimulate mitochondrial research using model organisms. MiGenes is a large-scale relational database that is automatically updated to keep pace with advances in mitochondrial proteomics and is curated to assure that the designation of proteins as mitochondrial reflects gene ontology (GO) annotations supported by high-quality evidence codes. A set of postulates is proposed to help define which proteins are authentic components of mitochondria. MiGenes incorporates >1160 new GO annotations to human, mouse and rat protein records, 370 of which represent the first GO annotation reflecting a mitochondrial localization. MiGenes employs a flexible search interface that permits batchwise accession number searches to support high-throughput proteomic studies. A web interface is provided to permit members of the mitochondrial research community to suggest modifications in protein annotations or mitochondrial status.

Algorithms mining relationships between genes and phenotypes can be classified into several overlapping categories based on how a phenotype is defined: by training genes known to be related to the phenotype; by keywords and algorithms designed to work with disease phenotypes. In this work an algorithm of linking phenotypes to Gene Ontology (GO) annotations is outlined, which does not require training genes and is based on algorithmic principles of Genes to Diseases (G2D) gene prioritization tool. In the outlined algorithm phenotypes are defined by terms of Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). GO annotations are linked to phenotypes through intermediate MeSH D terms of drugs and chemicals. This inference uses mathematical framework of fuzzy binary relationships based on fuzzy set theory. Strength of relationships between the terms is defined through frequency of co-occurrences of the pairs of terms in PubMed articles and a frequency of association between GO annotations and MeSH D terms in NCBI Gene gene2go and gene2pubmed datasets. Three plain tab-delimited datasets that are required by the algorithm are contributed to support computations. These datasets can be imported into a relational MySQL database. MySQL statements to create tables are provided. MySQL procedure implementing computations that are performed by outlined algorithm is listed. Plain tab-delimited format of contributed tables makes it easy to use this dataset in other applications.

BackgroundAnnotation of proteins with gene ontology (GO) terms is ongoing work and a complex task. Manual GO annotation is precise and precious, but it is time-consuming. Therefore, instead of curated annotations most of the proteins come with uncurated annotations, which have been generated automatically. Text-mining systems that use literature for automatic annotation have been proposed but they do not satisfy the high quality expectations of curators.ResultsIn this paper we describe an approach that links uncurated annotations to text extracted from literature. The selection of the text is based on the similarity of the text to the term from the uncurated annotation. Besides substantiating the uncurated annotations, the extracted texts also lead to novel annotations. In addition, the approach uses the GO hierarchy to achieve high precision. Our approach is integrated into GOAnnotator, a tool that assists the curation process for GO annotation of UniProt proteins.ConclusionThe GO curators assessed GOAnnotator with a set of 66 distinct UniProt/SwissProt proteins with uncurated annotations. GOAnnotator provided correct evidence text at 93% precision. This high precision results from using the GO hierarchy to only select GO terms similar to GO terms from uncurated annotations in GOA. Our approach is the first one to achieve high precision, which is crucial for the efficient support of GO curators. GOAnnotator was implemented as a web tool that is freely available at .

The Mouse Genome Database, (MGD, http://www.informatics.jax.org/), integrates genetic, genomic and phenotypic information about the laboratory mouse, a primary animal model for studying human biology and disease. MGD data content includes comprehensive characterization of genes and their functions, standardized descriptions of mouse phenotypes, extensive integration of DNA and protein sequence data, normalized representation of genome and genome variant information including comparative data on mammalian genes. Data within MGD are obtained from diverse sources including manual curation of the biomedical literature, direct contributions from individual investigator's laboratories and major informatics resource centers such as Ensembl, UniProt and NCBI. MGD collaborates with the bioinformatics community on the development of data and semantic standards such as the Gene Ontology (GO) and the Mammalian Phenotype (MP) Ontology. MGD provides a data-mining platform that enables the development of translational research hypotheses based on comparative genotype, phenotype and functional analyses. Both web-based querying and computational access to data are provided. Recent improvements in MGD described here include the association of gene trap data with mouse genes and a new batch query capability for customized data access and retrieval.

The study of protein–protein interaction and the determination of protein functions are important parts of proteomics. Computational methods are used to study the similarity between proteins based on Gene Ontology (GO) to explore their functions and possible interactions. GO is a series of standardized terms that describe gene products from molecular functions, biological processes, and cell components. Previous studies on assessing the similarity of GO terms were primarily based on Information Content (IC) between GO terms to measure the similarity of proteins. However, these methods tend to ignore the structural information between GO terms. Therefore, considering the structural information of GO terms, we systematically analyze the performance of the GO graph and GO Annotation (GOA) graph in calculating the similarity of proteins using different graph embedding methods. When applied to the actual Human and Yeast datasets, the feature vectors of GO terms and proteins are learned based on different graph embedding methods. To measure the similarity of the proteins annotated by different GO numbers, we used Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and cosine to calculate protein similarity in GO graph and GOA graph, respectively. Link prediction experiments were then performed to evaluate the reliability of protein similarity networks constructed by different methods. It is shown that graph embedding methods have obvious advantages over the traditional IC-based methods. We found that random walk graph embedding methods, in particular, showed excellent performance in calculating the similarity of proteins. By comparing link prediction experiment results from GO(DTW) and GOA(cosine) methods, it is shown that GO(DTW) features provide highly effective information for analyzing the similarity among proteins.

Gene Ontology (GO) is a universal resource for analyses and interpretation of high-throughput biological datasets. GO is developed and curated by several different groups, based at scientific institutions around the world, working together under the auspices of the GO Consortium. GO annotations capture biological functional knowledge by associating gene products with GO terms. GO term and gene product records all have computer-readable accession numbers; therefore, these annotations can be easily used for analyses of large datasets while retaining human-readable labels. The UCL Functional Gene Annotation group focuses on GO annotation of human gene products. Our group has led initiatives to systematically annotate proteins and microRNAs across specific biomedical fields, and our current biocuration effort, funded by the Alzheimer's Research UK foundation, is focused on dementia and Alzheimer's disease. Our group has also contributed to the development and revision of the ontology describing neurological domains of biology. Here we present an overview of GO and explain how our work, as well as the work of other members of the GO Consortium, is improving the neurological domains of the GO resource. These biocuration efforts will benefit the dementia and Alzheimer's research community by rendering GO more suitable for analyses of neurological datasets.

The standard method for comparing gene products (proteins or RNA) is to compare their DNA or amino acid sequences. Additional information about some gene products may come from multiple sources, including the set of Gene Ontology (GO) annotations and the set of journal abstracts related to each gene product. Gene product similarity measures can be based on evaluating sets of descriptor terms found in the GO taxonomy, and/or the index term sets of the related documents (MeSH annotations). While our techniques can be applied to term sets from any taxonomy, we restrict our examples in this article to GO annotations. We investigate the use of linear order statistics (LOS) to build similarity relations on pairs of terms that are used in the GO as linguistic descriptors of genes and gene products. One of our objectives is to investigate the construction and utility of visual assessments of relational data (in this case, dissimilarity matrices) for discovering tendencies of groups of gene products to "cluster together". We use gene product data derived from a group of 194 gene products representing three protein families extracted from ENSEMBL. Our examples suggest that LOS similarity measures are more effective than traditional sequence-based similarity measures at capturing relationships between pairs of gene products in ENSEMBL families when annotation information is available. We show examples of how these similarity measures can assist in knowledge discovery and gene product family validation.

The Gene Ontology (GO) is a framework designed to represent biological knowledge about gene products' biological roles and the cellular location in which they act. Biocuration is a complex process: the body of scientific literature is large and selection of appropriate GO terms can be challenging. Both these issues are compounded by the fact that our understanding of biology is still incomplete; hence it is important to appreciate that GO is inherently an evolving model. In this chapter, we describe how biocurators create GO annotations from experimental findings from research articles. We describe the current best practices for high-quality literature curation and how GO curators succeed in modeling biology using a relatively simple framework. We also highlight a number of difficulties when translating experimental assays into GO annotations.

A race through the maze of genomic evidence