Cellular process ontology

The GO (Gene Ontology) project provides a controlled vocabulary to describe gene and gene product attributes in any organism. Annotated are the biological process, the molecular function, and the cellular component of gene products. 

The current project contains more than 20,000 terms for biological processes, cellular components, and molecular functions. The ontologies can be downloaded in different formats including extensible Markup Language (XML) and the open-source relational database scheme MySQL. 

A new subdiscipline of bioinformatics, comparative proteogenomics, is based on the possibility of mapping sets of sequenced peptides onto the positions in the genome that code for them, i.e., integration of data from MS-based proteomics with DNA sequence data sets. Databases and software to determine if the available data are over- or underrepresented include Gene Ontology, protein domains, and pathway databases. Another application (of many) is the combination of MS-based proteomic data with information from transcriptomics to study the processes and regulation of cellular functions. 

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