Automated methods of predicting the function of biological sequences using GO and BLAST

Background: With the exponential increase in genomic sequence data there is a need to develop automated approaches to deducing the biological functions of novel sequences with high accuracy. Our aim is to demonstrate how accuracy benchmarking can be used in a decision-making process evaluating competing designs of biological function predictors. We utilise the Gene Ontology, GO, a directed acyclic graph of functional terms, to annotate sequences with functional information describing their biological context. Initially we examine the effect on accuracy scores of increasing the allowed distance between predicted and a test set of curator assigned terms. Next we evaluate several annotator methods using accuracy benchmarking. Given an unannotated sequence we use the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, BLAST, to find similar sequences that have already been assigned GO terms by curators. A number of methods were developed that utilise terms associated with the best five matching sequences....

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Craig E. Jones, Ute Baumann, Alfred L. Brown
• Keywords: Accuracy Score, Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, Biological Function, BMCBI 2005