Gene Annotation

The BHF has funded a Gene Ontology project for cardiovascular genes, which will be of benefit to all cardiovascular scientists.

A list of over 4000 genes implicated in cardiovascular systems have been identified for inclusion in the database, and the international advisory panel helped to rank these in terms of priority for annotation in the first year.

Since the start of the project, in November 2007, 110 human genes have been annotated with a total of over 1,000 GO terms, and 46 prioritised genes have been comprehensively annotated.

Now, cardiovascular scientists have the opportunity to comment on the genes prioritised for annotation, to review the annotation of their 'favourite' genes and suggest what information is missing, incomplete or inaccurate in these annotations.

To look at the database and add your feedback, go to:
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/medicine/cardiovascular-genetics/geneontology.html

What is Gene Ontology?
(According to Wikipedia) provides a controlled vocabulary to describe gene and gene product attributes in any organism. It can be broadly split into two parts.

The first is the ontology itself - actually three ontologies, each representing a key concept in Molecular Biology: the molecular function of gene products; their role in multi-step biological processes; and their localization to cellular components. The ontolog(ies) are continuously updated, and new versions are made available on a monthly basis.

The second part is annotation, the characterization of gene products using terms from the ontology.