GOstat: find statistically overrepresented Gene Ontologies within a group of genes

TLDR

Modern experimental techniques such as DNA microarrays generate long lists of genes that may be relevant to the studied process, and the Gene‑Ontology database offers a useful tool to annotate and analyze their functions. The authors aim to provide biological insight by analyzing functional annotations of gene lists, introducing a tool that identifies typical annotations. The tool automatically retrieves GO annotations from a database and computes statistics to identify overrepresented annotations in the gene list. The output is a list of GO terms ranked by specificity. The program GOstat is available online at http://gostat.wehi.edu.au.

Abstract

Abstract Summary: Modern experimental techniques, as for example DNA microarrays, as a result usually produce a long list of genes, which are potentially interesting in the analyzed process. In order to gain biological understanding from this type of data, it is necessary to analyze the functional annotations of all genes in this list. The Gene-Ontology (GO) database provides a useful tool to annotate and analyze the functions of a large number of genes. Here, we introduce a tool that utilizes this information to obtain an understanding of which annotations are typical for the analyzed list of genes. This program automatically obtains the GO annotations from a database and generates statistics of which annotations are overrepresented in the analyzed list of genes. This results in a list of GO terms sorted by their specificity. Availability: Our program GOstat is accessible via the Internet at http://gostat.wehi.edu.au