Annotation - Computational Biology

Computational Biology

Since the 1980s, molecular biology and bioinformatics have created the need for DNA annotation. DNA annotation or genome annotation is the process of identifying the locations of genes and all of the coding regions in a genome and determining what those genes do. An annotation (irrespective of the context) is a note added by way of explanation or commentary. Once a genome is sequenced, it needs to be annotated to make sense of it.

For DNA annotation, a previously unknown sequence representation of genetic material is enriched with information relating genomic position to intron-exon boundaries, regulatory sequences, repeats, gene names and protein products. This annotation is stored in genomic databases as Mouse Genome Informatics, FlyBase, and WormBase. Educational materials on some aspects of biological annotation from this year's Gene Ontology annotation camp and similar events are available at the Gene Ontology website.

The National Center for Biomedical Ontology (www.bioontology.org) develops tools for automated annotation of database records based on the textual descriptions of those records.