Use and misuse of the gene ontology annotations

The Gene Ontology (GO) project is a collaboration among model organism databases to describe gene products from all organisms using a consistent and computable language. GO produces sets of explicitly defined, structured vocabularies that describe biological processes, molecular functions and cellular components of gene products in both a computer- and human-readable manner. Here we describe key aspects of GO, which, when overlooked, can cause erroneous results, and address how these pitfalls can be avoided.

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