The Gene Ontology Consortium
The Gene Ontology (GO) project provides the most comprehensive resource currently available for computable knowledge regarding the functions of genes and gene products.
The mission of the GO Consortium is to develop an up-to-date, comprehensive, computational model of biological systems, from the molecular level to larger pathways, cellular and organism-level systems.
Current statistics
"Unifying Biology."
Due to the staggering complexity of biological systems and the ever-increasing size of datasets to analyze, biomedical research is becoming increasingly dependent on knowledge stored in computable form. The Gene Ontology (GO) project provides the most comprehensive resource currently available for computable knowledge regarding the functions of genes and gene products.
The GO knowledgebase is composed of two primary components:
Basic enrichment analysis
Ontology
The ontology provides the logical structure of the biological functions (‘terms’) and their relationships to one another, manifested as a directed graph of terms and relations.
Annotations
The corpus of GO annotations, evidence-based statements relating a specific gene product (a protein, non-coding RNA, or macromolecular complex, which we refer to hereafter as ‘genes’ for simplicity) to a specific ontology term
Together, the ontology and annotations aim to describe a comprehensive model of biological systems. Currently, the GO knowledgebase includes experimental findings from almost 140 000 published papers, represented as over 600 000 experimentally-supported GO annotations. These provide the core dataset for additional inference of over 6 million functional annotations for a diverse set of organisms spanning the tree of life.
In addition to this core knowledgebase, GO resources also include software to edit and perform logical reasoning over the ontologies, web access to the ontology and annotations, and analytical tools that use the GO knowledgebase to support biomedical research.