GOLEM: an interactive graph-based gene-ontology navigation and analysis tool

Background: The Gene Ontology has become an extremely useful tool for the analysis of genomic data and structuring of biological knowledge. Several excellent software tools for navigating the gene ontology have been developed. However, no existing system provides an interactively expandable graph-based view of the gene ontology hierarchy. Furthermore, most existing tools are web-based or require an Internet connection, will not load local annotations files, and provide either analysis or visualization functionality, but not both. Results: To address the above limitations, we have developed GOLEM (Gene Ontology Local Exploration Map), a visualization and analysis tool for focused exploration of the gene ontology graph. GOLEM allows the user to dynamically expand and focus the local graph structure of the gene ontology hierarchy in the neighborhood of any chosen term. It also supports rapid analysis of an input list of genes to find enriched gene ontology terms. The GOLEM application pe...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: BMCBI
• Authors: Rachel S. G. Sealfon, Matthew A. Hibbs, Curtis Huttenhower, Chad L. Myers, Olga G. Troyanskaya
• Keywords: BMCBI 2006, Gene, Gene Ontology, Ontology