EC2GO mapping
Enzyme Commission (EC) numbers are manually curated into the description line of Swiss-Prot
entries and added automatically to TrEMBL entries.
Mappings between EC and the corresponding GO terms are automatically made using the EC
cross-references in the GO Molecular Function ontology. Also see Hill et al . (2001).
The mappings are then transitively assigned at each GOA release. GO annotations using this technique
will receive the evidence code Inferred from Electronic Annotation (IEA). This method has been
evaluated at up to 100% accurate(Camon et. al . 2005)
The EC2GO mapping file is available at:
http://www.geneontology.org/external2go/ec2go .
Example. EC 6.4.1.2 is the Enzyme Commission number for Acetyl-CoA carboxylase and
has therefore been mapped to the GO term ‘acetyl-CoA carboxylase activity’ (GO:0003989).
The alpha subunit of acetyl-coenzyme A carboxylase carboxyl transferase (UniProtKB accession A0AJ21,
see Fig. 1) is associated with EC 6.4.1.2 within UniProtKB, therefore because of the mapping between
the EC number and the GO term this protein (and any protein assigned EC 6.4.1.2) will be
automatically associated with the GO term ‘acetyl-CoA carboxylase activity’.
The annotations created by EC2GO mapping are displayed in the GOA gene association files (Fig. 1),
the EC identifier will be indicated in column 8 ('With') and column 6 (DB:Reference) will indicate
that this method has the GO reference: GO_REF:0000003. EC2GO annotations can also be viewed in
QuickGO .
Hill et al . (2001) Program description: Strategies for
biological annotation of mammalian systems: implementing gene ontologies in mouse genome informatics.
Genomics 74:121-128.
Camon et al. (2005) An evaluation of GO annotation retrieval for BioCreAtIvE and GOA. BMC
Bioinformatics 6 Suppl. 1:S17
