Ontology Annotation Treebrowser.An Interactive Tool Where the Complementarity of Medical Subject Headings and Gene Ontology Improves the Interpretation of Gene Lists

摘要

Gene expression and proteomics analysis allow the investigation of thousands of biomolecules in parallel.This results in a long list of interesting genes or proteins and a list of annotation terms in the order of thousands. It is not a trivial task to understand such a gene list and it would require extensive efforts to bring together the overwhelming amounts of associated information from the literature and databases. Thus, it is evident that we need ways of condensing and filtering this information. An excellent way to represent knowledge is to use ontologies, where it is possible to group genes or terms with overlapping context, rather than studying one-dimensional lists of keywords. Therefore, we have built the ontology annotation treebrowser (OAT) to represent, condense, filter and summarise the knowledge associated with a list of genes or proteins.