What is GOA?

Why do we need Gene Ontology annotation?

As proteomics research advances, biologists require innovative ways to access and analyse protein data. To fully leverage these datasets, it is essential to capture and provide consistent descriptions of protein functions. This process of adding biological information to protein data is called annotation.

What Is the Gene Ontology Annotation (GOA) Project?

The Gene Ontology Annotation (GOA) project applies GO terms to describe proteins in UniProtKB. GOA provides annotations for all complete and incomplete proteomes in UniProtKB using a combination of manual and automatic annotation methods.

• Manual Annotation:
  Curators manually assign GO terms to proteins based on evidence from scientific literature. Each manually assigned GO term is accompanied by an evidence code that reflects the type of evidence supporting the annotation. For more details on manual annotation procedures, visit the GOA website.
• Automatic Annotation:
  Automatic annotation is a high-throughput method of assigning GO terms to gene products. The GOA project is a leading producer of automatic annotations within the GO Consortium. Details of the various automatic annotation pipelines are available on the GOA website.

How Is GOA Maintained?
The GOA database is updated every four weeks to reflect the latest data from sources such as UniProtKB, Ensembl, Ensembl Genomes, and InterPro. Additionally, GO annotations are imported from other members of the GO Consortium and its collaborators.

By annotating characterised proteins with GO terms and transferring this knowledge to similar, uncharacterised proteins, the GOA project contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of all proteomes. The impact of GO can be seen in the growing number of databases that use it to annotate and share biological knowledge, with GOA playing a key role in this global effort.