The UniProt-GO Annotation database in 2011

TLDR

The GO annotation dataset provided by the UniProt Consortium (GOA) is a comprehensive set of evidence‑based associations between Gene Ontology terms and UniProtKB proteins. The dataset is built from detailed manual annotations curated from peer‑reviewed literature, supplemented by manual and electronic annotations from 36 model‑organism and domain‑focused resources, enriched with high‑quality automatic predictions, and is freely available in multiple formats including a new normalized file format introduced in 2010. The resource now supplies over 100 million annotations to 11 million proteins across more than 360 000 taxa, a two‑fold increase in two years, and benefits from extensive checks that improve correctness, consistency, and information content.

Abstract

The GO annotation dataset provided by the UniProt Consortium (GOA: http://www.ebi.ac.uk/GOA) is a comprehensive set of evidenced-based associations between terms from the Gene Ontology resource and UniProtKB proteins. Currently supplying over 100 million annotations to 11 million proteins in more than 360,000 taxa, this resource has increased 2-fold over the last 2 years and has benefited from a wealth of checks to improve annotation correctness and consistency as well as now supplying a greater information content enabled by GO Consortium annotation format developments. Detailed, manual GO annotations obtained from the curation of peer-reviewed papers are directly contributed by all UniProt curators and supplemented with manual and electronic annotations from 36 model organism and domain-focused scientific resources. The inclusion of high-quality, automatic annotation predictions ensures the UniProt GO annotation dataset supplies functional information to a wide range of proteins, including those from poorly characterized, non-model organism species. UniProt GO annotations are freely available in a range of formats accessible by both file downloads and web-based views. In addition, the introduction of a new, normalized file format in 2010 has made for easier handling of the complete UniProt-GOA data set.