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Gene ontology (GO) is a major bioinformatics initiative to unify the representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species. More specifically, the project aims to: 1) Maintain and develop its controlled vocabulary of gene and gene product attributes; 2) Annotate genes and gene products, and assimilate and disseminate annotation data; and 3) Provide tools for easy access to all aspects of the data provided by the project, and to enable functional interpretation of experimental data using the GO, for example via enrichment analysis. GO is part of a larger classification effort, the Open Biomedical Ontologies (OBO). Although gene nomenclature itself aims to maintain and develop controlled vocabulary of gene and gene products, gene ontology extends the effort by using markup language to make the data (not only of the genes and their products but also of all their attributes) machine readable, and to do so in a way that is unified across all species (whereas gene nomenclature conventions vary by biologic taxon). ==Terms and ontology== From a practical view, an ontology is a representation of something we know about. “Ontologies" consist of a representation of things that are detectable or directly observable, and the relationships between those things. There is no universal standard terminology in biology and related domains, and term usages may be specific to a species, research area or even a particular research group. This makes communication and sharing of data more difficult. The Gene Ontology project provides an ontology of defined terms representing gene product properties. The ontology covers three domains: * cellular component, the parts of a cell or its extracellular environment; * molecular function, the elemental activities of a gene product at the molecular level, such as binding or catalysis; * biological process, operations or sets of molecular events with a defined beginning and end, pertinent to the functioning of integrated living units: cells, tissues, organs, and organisms. Each GO term within the ontology has a term name, which may be a word or string of words; a unique alphanumeric identifier; a definition with cited sources; and a namespace indicating the domain to which it belongs. Terms may also have synonyms, which are classed as being exactly equivalent to the term name, broader, narrower, or related; references to equivalent concepts in other databases; and comments on term meaning or usage. The GO ontology is structured as a directed acyclic graph, and each term has defined relationships to one or more other terms in the same domain, and sometimes to other domains. The GO vocabulary is designed to be species-neutral, and includes terms applicable to prokaryotes and eukaryotes, single and multicellular organisms. GO is not static, and additions, corrections and alterations are suggested by, and solicited from, members of the research and annotation communities, as well as by those directly involved in the GO project. For example, an annotator may request a specific term to represent a metabolic pathway, or a section of the ontology may be revised with the help of community experts (e.g.). Suggested edits are reviewed by the ontology editors, and implemented where appropriate. The GO ontology file is freely available from the GO website〔(【引用サイトリンク】 Gene Ontology Database )〕 in a number of formats, or can be accessed online using the GO browser AmiGO. The Gene Ontology project also provides downloadable mappings of its terms to other classification systems. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「gene ontology」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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