What can I do with GO?

One of the most common applications of the Gene Ontology (GO) is GO enrichment analysis. This method identifies significant shared GO terms (or their parent terms) annotated to genes in a query set—such as genes overexpressed in a microarray experiment. GO enrichment analysis helps uncover commonalities among the genes in your dataset.

Beyond enrichment analysis, GO is also used for a variety of purposes, including:

• Integrating proteomic data across different organisms.
• Assigning functions to protein domains.
• Identifying functional similarities among genes that are over- or under-expressed in diseases or during aging.
• Analyzing co-expressed genes during developmental stages.
• Automating information extraction about gene functions from scientific literature.
• Validating models of genetic, metabolic, and product interaction networks.