GO Immunology: Introduction to GO Annotation

A Rough Guide to GO Annotation
Recommended Reading

A Rough Guide to GO Annotation

In simple terms, a GO annotation is the manual or electronic association of a GO term representing a biological process, cellular component, or molecular function term with a gene product. The evidence for the association is captured by recording the reference, and the nature of the evidence is classified using a code from the GO evidence code set. Every GO annotation created by the GO Consortium follows strict annotation guidelines; see the GO annotation guide for more information.

At present, many of the immune gene GO annotations are to high level (i.e. rather general) GO terms. Many have been generated electronically and carry the inferred from electronic annotation (IEA) evidence code. You can read more about these electronic techniques in Camon et al., 2004. Although electronic annotations are an efficient way of assigning GO terms, manual deep level GO annotations using experimental GO evidence codes, such as inferred from direct assay or inferred from genetic interaction, are far more reliable.

It is manual annotation that this project will focus on. Pending funding in March 2008, a team of curators skilled in both GO curation and immunology plan to manually and comprehensively annotate the experimental literature associated with the list of immune relevant genes available via the community annotation wiki.

For example of a manually annotated gene, please see human BCL10.

the Gene Ontology

GO Immunology: Introduction to GO Annotation

A Rough Guide to GO Annotation

Recommended reading