Gene Ontology Consortium: going forward

TLDR

The Gene Ontology (GO) is a community‑based bioinformatics resource that represents gene product function using ontologies. The authors aim to improve GO by expanding ontology branches, updating dissemination methods, and soliciting community feedback. They provide a new AmiGO 2 browser that enables GO enrichment analysis and cross‑species searches of terms, annotations, and metadata. The consortium expanded cilia, cell‑cycle, and multicellular organism terms, introduced rule‑based term‑generation templates, increased logical definitions, and launched an improved website portal.

Abstract

The Gene Ontology (GO; http://www.geneontology.org) is a community-based bioinformatics resource that supplies information about gene product function using ontologies to represent biological knowledge. Here we describe improvements and expansions to several branches of the ontology, as well as updates that have allowed us to more efficiently disseminate the GO and capture feedback from the research community. The Gene Ontology Consortium (GOC) has expanded areas of the ontology such as cilia-related terms, cell-cycle terms and multicellular organism processes. We have also implemented new tools for generating ontology terms based on a set of logical rules making use of templates, and we have made efforts to increase our use of logical definitions. The GOC has a new and improved web site summarizing new developments and documentation, serving as a portal to GO data. Users can perform GO enrichment analysis, and search the GO for terms, annotations to gene products, and associated metadata across multiple species using the all-new AmiGO 2 browser. We encourage and welcome the input of the research community in all biological areas in our continued effort to improve the Gene Ontology.