Gene Ontology - Annotation

Annotation

Genome annotation is the practice of capturing data about a gene product, and GO annotations use terms from the GO ontology to do so. The members of the GO Consortium submit their annotation for integration and dissemination on the GO website, where they can be downloaded directly or viewed online using AmiGO. In addition to the gene product identifier and the relevant GO term, GO annotations have the following data:

• The reference used to make the annotation (e.g. a journal article)
• An evidence code denoting the type of evidence upon which the annotation is based
• The date and the creator of the annotation

The evidence code comes from the Evidence Code Ontology, a controlled vocabulary of codes covering both manual and automated annotation methods. For example, Traceable Author Statement (TAS) means a curator has read a published scientific paper and the metadata for that annotation bears a citation to that paper; Inferred from Sequence Similarity (ISS) means a human curator has reviewed the output from a sequence similarity search and verified that it is biologically meaningful. Annotations from automated processes (for example, remapping annotations created using another annotation vocabulary) are given the code Inferred from Electronic Annotation (IEA). As of April 1st, 2010, over 98% of all GO annotations were inferred computationally, not by curators. As these annotations are not checked by a human, the GO Consortium considers them to be less reliable and includes only a subset in the data available online in AmiGO. Full annotation data sets can be downloaded from the GO website. To support the development of annotation, the GO Consortium provides study camps and mentors to new groups of developers.