Cardiovascular Gene Ontology Annotation Initiative - Summarising gene function to better understand heart development and cardiovascular processes

The integration of biomedical research, describing the biological processes relevant to cardiovascular processes, into Gene Ontology, microRNA and protein interaction databases.

New lab techniques can unravel the complexities of the heart and circulatory system much faster, by studying many processes or molecules in a single experiment. These ‘high-throughput’ techniques reveal a huge amount of extremely valuable information, often revealing new molecules that are present in healthy or diseased tissues which could be targets for drugs. Understanding the processes taking place and what different molecules do depends on matching up information gathered from these huge data-gathering experiments with what scientists already know about them. Scientists match up this information using a process called ‘annotation’, where the functions of each gene or molecule are summarised from published scientific papers using standard descriptions (called Gene Ontology). Computer algorithms then use this knowledge to interpret what large datasets mean. The quality of annotations determines how well the high-throughput datasets can be translated, and until recently, progress for heart and circulatory disease was hampered because many of the likely genes involved were not annotated. Since 2007, the BHF has funded scientists at University College London to take part in the Cardiovascular Gene Ontology Annotation Initiative, an international unique public resource for heart scientists that specifically annotates heart genes and molecules. Following their success at improving heart-related data, we are funding this initiative for a further five years, to annotate genes related to heart development and cardiovascular processes. This research will help scientists understand the cellular processes involved in the development of heart and circulatory disease, helping find new ways to prevent or treat it.