GObar: A Gene Ontology based analysis and visualization tool for gene sets

Background: Microarray experiments, as well as other genomic analyses, often result in large gene sets containing up to several hundred genes. The biological significance of such sets of genes is, usually, not readily apparent. Identification of the functions of the genes in the set can help highlight features of interest. The Gene Ontology Consortium [1] has annotated genes in several model organisms using a controlled vocabulary of terms and placed the terms on a Gene Ontology (GO), which comprises three disjoint hierarchies for Molecular functions, Biological processes and Cellular locations. The annotations can be used to identify functions that are enriched in the set, but this analysis can be misleading since the underlying distribution of genes among various functions is not uniform. For example, a large number of genes in a set might be kinases just because the genome contains many kinases. Results: We use the Gene Ontology hierarchy and the annotations to pick significant fun...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Jason S. M. Lee, Gurpreet Katari, Ravi Sachidanandam
• Keywords: BMCBI 2005, Gene, Gene Lists, Gene Ontology