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The Gene Ontology (GO) database and informatics resource

M A Harris et al. Nucleic Acids Res. .

Abstract

The Gene Ontology (GO) project (http://www. geneontology.org/) provides structured, controlled vocabularies and classifications that cover several domains of molecular and cellular biology and are freely available for community use in the annotation of genes, gene products and sequences. Many model organism databases and genome annotation groups use the GO and contribute their annotation sets to the GO resource. The GO database integrates the vocabularies and contributed annotations and provides full access to this information in several formats. Members of the GO Consortium continually work collectively, involving outside experts as needed, to expand and update the GO vocabularies. The GO Web resource also provides access to extensive documentation about the GO project and links to applications that use GO data for functional analyses.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Application of a GO slim set in genome annotation. The number of gene products annotated to each term in each of four model organism genomes is shown for a GO slim set taken from the cellular component ontology (data as of August 1, 2003).
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