Finding New Order in Biological Functions from the Network Structure of Gene Annotations

10Citations
Citations of this article
63Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.

Abstract

The Gene Ontology (GO) provides biologists with a controlled terminology that describes how genes are associated with functions and how functional terms are related to one another. These term-term relationships encode how scientists conceive the organization of biological functions, and they take the form of a directed acyclic graph (DAG). Here, we propose that the network structure of gene-term annotations made using GO can be employed to establish an alternative approach for grouping functional terms that captures intrinsic functional relationships that are not evident in the hierarchical structure established in the GO DAG. Instead of relying on an externally defined organization for biological functions, our approach connects biological functions together if they are performed by the same genes, as indicated in a compendium of gene annotation data from numerous different sources. We show that grouping terms by this alternate scheme provides a new framework with which to describe and predict the functions of experimentally identified sets of genes.

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Glass, K., & Girvan, M. (2015). Finding New Order in Biological Functions from the Network Structure of Gene Annotations. PLoS Computational Biology, 11(11). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004565

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free