GO Tools: Browsers

Gene Ontology (GO), the de facto standard in gene functionality description, is used widely in functional annotation and enrichment analysis. Here, we introduce agriGO, an integrated web-based GO analysis toolkit for the agricultural community, using the advantages of our previous GO enrichment tool (EasyGO), to meet analysis demands from new technologies and research objectives. EasyGO is valuable for its proficiency, and has proved useful in uncovering biological knowledge in massive data sets from high-throughput experiments. For agriGO, the system architecture and website interface were redesigned to improve performance and accessibility. The supported organisms and gene identifiers were substantially expanded (including 38 agricultural species composed of 274 data types). The requirement on user input is more flexible, in that user-defined reference and annotation are accepted. Moreover, a new analysis approach using Gene Set Enrichment Analysis strategy and customizable features is provided. Four tools, SEA (Singular enrichment analysis), PAGE (Parametric Analysis of Gene set Enrichment), BLAST4ID (Transfer IDs by BLAST) and SEACOMPARE (Cross comparison of SEA), are integrated as a toolkit to meet different demands. We also provide a cross-comparison service so that different data sets can be compared and explored in a visualized way. Lastly, agriGO functions as a GO data repository with search and download functions; agriGO is publicly accessible at http://bioinfo.cau.edu.cn/agriGO/.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation visualization
• database or data warehouse
• statistical analysis
• term enrichment
• text mining

AmiGO provides an interface to search and browse the ontology and annotation data provided by the GO consortium. Users can search for gene products and view the terms with which they are associated; alternatively, users can search or browse the ontology for GO terms of interest and see term details and gene product annotations. AmiGO also provides a BLAST search engine, which searches the sequences of genes and gene products that have been annotated to a GO term and submitted to the GO Consortium.

AmiGO accesses the GO mySQL database; more information is available from the GO database guide.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• slimmer-type tool
• term enrichment
• other analysis

Bioconductor provides tools for the analysis and comprehension of high-throughput (microarray, sequence, flow, etc.) genomic data. Bioconductor uses the R statistical programming language, and is open source and open development. There are more than core and user-contributed 400 packages. Bioconductor packages the GO ontology into our semi-annual release, with software tools to: query; join with diverse additional gene, microarray, and sequence annotations; incorporate GO into annotation, differential expression, and gene set enrichment work flows; and visualize.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• database or data warehouse
• software library
• statistical analysis
• term enrichment
• text mining
• other analysis
• Flexible integration of GO into statistical analysis and comprehension of high-throughput genetic data.

Gene Ontology Browsing Utility (GOBU) (GOBU) is a Java-based software program for integrating biological annotation catalogs under an extendable software architecture. Users may interact with the Gene Ontology and user-defined hierarchy data of genes, and then use its plugins to (and not limited to) (1) browse the GO hierarchy with user defined data, (2) browse GO-oriented expression levels in the user data, (3) compute GO enrichment, and/or (4) customize data reporting.
A set of classes and utility functions has been established so that a customized program can be made as a plugin or a command-line tool that programmically manipulate the Gene Ontology and specified user data. See the source code repository for examples.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation visualization
• software library
• statistical analysis
• term enrichment

Gene Ontology For Functional Analysis (GOFFA) is a tool developed for ArrayTrack that takes a list of genes and identifies terms in Gene Ontology associated with those genes. GOFFA provides tools to view/access the following:
* GO term hierarchy
* Full listing of GO terms annotated with the genes associated with a given term
* Fisher's exact test p-value providing the probability of identifying that many genes for a given term by chance alone
* Relative enrichment factor (E-value) giving the enrichment of a GO term for genes in the submitted list relative to the frequency of genes assigned to that term from the full set of GOFFA annotated genes for a particular species

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• database or data warehouse
• term enrichment
• text mining

Gene Ontology Normal Usage Tracking System (GONUTS) is a wiki-based system for using GO. GONUTS contains term pages where users can add or view notes elaborating on usage of GO terms. GONUTS also allows users to create and edit gene pages for any gene with a UniProt accession, and has tools to support annotation jamborees. GONUTS is the home of the CACAO (Community Assessment of Community Annotation with Ontologies) project to couple GO annotation to undergraduate education.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation editor

GeneTools is a collection of web-based tools that brings together information from a broad range of resources, and provides this in a manner particularly useful for genome-wide analyses. Today, the two main tools connected to this database are the NMC Annotation Database V2.0 and eGOn V2.0 (explore Gene Ontology).

The NMC Annotation Database V2.0 provides information from UniGene, EntrezGene, SwissProt and Gene Ontology (GO). Major features are:

• Single search/Batch search, extraction of data for single or batches of genes.
• Manage reporter lists: in folders and share selected lists with other users.
• Manual GO Annotation: add your own Gene Ontology (GO) annotations to genes of interest.
• Export: to Excel, text or XML format.

eGOn V2.0 facilitates interpretation of GO annotation. GO terms are retrieved in batch modus from EntrezGene and the GO database and displayed in the GO directed acyclic hierarchical graph (DAG). Essential features of eGOn V2.0 are:

• Visualization: gene annotations are visualized in the GO DAG or as a table view. The granularity of the GO DAG can be edited freely by the user.
• Filtering: GO annotations can be filtered on evidence codes.
• Include user defined GO annotations: previously added to the Annotation database.
• Statistical analysis: Several gene lists are analyzed simultaneously to compare the distribution of the annotated genes over the GO hierarchy.

Statistical tests are implemented to allow the user to compute GO annotation dissimilarity within or between gene lists.

• Connection to Annotation database: Links to Annotation database gene and protein information are offered directly from the GO DAG or in exported data.
• Export: GO DAG information, statistical results and gene and protein information can be exported in excel, text or XML format.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• database or data warehouse
• statistical analysis
• term enrichment

GOSlimViewer is used to summarize the GO function associated with a data set using prepared GO Slim sets. The input is a tab separated list of gene product IDs and GO IDs.

• ontology or annotation browser
• slimmer-type tool

With the MGI GO Browser, you can search for a GO term and view all mouse genes annotated to the term or any subterms. You can also browse the ontologies to view relationships between terms, term definitions, as well as the number of mouse genes annotated to a given term and its subterms. The MGI GO browser directly accesses the GO data in the MGI database, which is updated nightly.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization

Network Ontology Analysis (NOA) (abbreviated to NOA) is a freely available collection of Gene Ontology tools aiming to analyze functions of gene network instead of gene list. Network rewiring facilitates the function changes between conditions even with the same gene list. Therefore, it is necessary to annotate the specific function of networks by considering the fundamental roles of interactions from the viewpoint of systems biology. NOA is such a novel functional enrichment analysis method capable to handle both dynamic and static networks. The application of NOA in biological networks shows that NOA can not only capture changing functions in rewiring networks but also find more relevant and specific functions in traditional static networks.

• ontology or annotation browser
• statistical analysis
• term enrichment

OBO-Edit is an open source, platform-independent application for viewing and editing any OBO format ontologies. OBO-Edit is a graph-based tool; its emphasis on the overall graph structure of an ontology provides a friendly interface for biologists, and makes OBO-Edit excellent for the rapid generation of large ontologies focusing on relationships between relatively simple classes.

OBO-Edit uses the OBO format flat file.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• ontology or annotation editor

Microarrays are at the center of a revolution in biotechnology, allowing researchers to screen tens of thousands of genes simultaneously. Typically, they have been used in exploratory research to help formulate hypotheses. In most cases, this phase is followed by a more focused, hypothesis driven stage in which certain specific biological processes and pathways are thought to be involved. Since a single biological process can still involve hundreds of genes, microarrays are still the preferred approach as proven by the availability of focused arrays from several manufacturers. Since focused arrays from different manufacturers use different sets of genes, each array will represent any given regulatory pathway to a different extent. We argue that a functional analysis of the arrays available should be the most important criterion used in the array selection. We developed Onto-Compare as a database that can provide this functionality, based on the GO nomenclature.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• database or data warehouse
• other analysis
• compare commercially available microarrays based on GO

Many Laboratories chose to design and print their own microarrays. At present, the choice of the genes to include on a certain microarray is a very laborious process requiring a high level of expertise. Onto-Design database is able to assist the designers of custom microarrays by providing the means to select genes based on their experiment.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• database or data warehouse
• other analysis
• design custom microarrays based on GO terms of interest

The typical result of a microarray experiment is a list of tens or hundreds of genes found to be differentially regulated in the condition under study. Independently of the methods used to select these genes, the common task faced by any researcher is to translate these lists of genes into a better understanding of the biological phenomena involved. Currently, this is done through a tedious combination of searches through the literature and a number of public databases. We developed Onto-Express (OE) as a novel tool able to automatically translate such lists of differentially regulated genes into functional profiles characterizing the impact of the condition studied. OE constructs functional profiles (using Gene Ontology terms) for the following categories: biochemical function, biological process, cellular role, cellular component, molecular function and chromosome location. Statistical significance values are calculated for each category. We demonstrated the validity and the utility of this comprehensive global analysis of gene function by analyzing two breast cancer data sets from two separate laboratories. OE was able to identify correctly all biological processes postulated by the original authors, as well as discover novel relevant mechanisms (Draghici et.al, Genomics, 81(2), 2003). Other results obtained with Onto-Express can be found in Khatri et.al., Genomics. 79(2), 2002.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• database or data warehouse
• statistical analysis
• term enrichment
• other analysis
• custom level of abstraction of the Gene Ontology

Onto-Express is a web-based tool in the Onto-Tools suite that performs automated function profiling for a list of differentially expressed genes. However, Onto-Express does not support functional profiling for the organisms that do not have annotations in public domain, or use of custom (i.e. user-defined) ontologies. This limitation is also true for most of the other existing tools for functional profiling (10), which means that researchers working with uncommon organisms and/or new annotations or ontologies may be forced to construct such profiles manually. Onto-Express To Go (OE2GO) is a new tool added to the Onto-Tools ensemble to address these issues. OE2GO is built on top of OE to leverage its existing functionality. In OE2GO, the users now have an option to use either the Onto-Tools database as a source of functional annotations or provide their own annotations in a separate file. Currently, OE2GO supports annotation file in the Gene Ontology format.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• statistical analysis
• term enrichment
• other analysis
• custom annotations, custom level of abstraction

OntoVisT is a general purpose ontological visualization tool. Ontologies have emerged as a fast growing research topic in the area of semantic web during last decade. Currently there are 204 ontologies that are available through OBO Foundry and BioPortal. Several excellent tools for navigating the ontological structure are available, however most of them are dedicated to a specific annotation data or integrated with specific analysis applications, and do not offer flexibility in terms of general-purpose usage for ontology exploration.
We developed OntoVisT, a web based ontological visualization tool. This application is designed for interactive visualization of any ontological hierarchy for a specific node of interest, up to the chosen level of children and/or ancestor. It takes any ontology file in OBO format as input and generates output as DAG hierarchical graph for the chosen query. To enhance the navigation capabilities of complex networks, we have embedded several features such as search criteria, zoom in/out, center focus, nearest neighbor highlights and mouse hover events. The application has been tested on all 72 data sets available in OBO format through OBO foundry. The results for few of them can be accessed through OntoVisT-Gallery.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• in such a way that it contains both the property of DAG as well as placement of all child nodes below their parent nodes. The advantage of this representation is the flow of information is uni-directional, The tool is designed to improve the interpretability by modifying the structure in DAG hierarchical form, which reduces the effort to interpret the network.

QuickGO is a web-based tool that allows easy browsing of the Gene Ontology (GO) and all associated electronic and manual GO annotations provided by the GO Consortium annotation groups. QuickGO offers a range of facilities including bulk downloads of GO annotation data which can be extensively filtered by a range of different parameters and GO slim set generation.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine
• ontology or annotation visualization
• database or data warehouse
• slimmer-type tool

The Software Tool for Rapid Annotation of Proteins saves you time by automatically annotating a protein list with information that helps you meaningfully interpret your mass spectrometry data. STRAP takes protein lists as input, in the form of plain text files, protXML files (usually from the TPP), or Dat files from MASCOT search results. From this, STRAP generates protein annotation tables, and a variety of GO charts to aid individual and differential analysis of proteomics data, as shown below. It downloads information from mainly the Uniprot and EBI QuickGO databases. STRAP requires Windows XP or higher with at least version 3.5 of the Microsoft .NET Framework installed.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation visualization
• Differential analysis of proteomics data sets

With the CGAP GO browser, you can browse through the GO vocabularies, and find human and mouse genes assigned to each term.
GO data updated every few months.

• ontology or annotation browser

COBrA is a Java-based ontology editor for bio-ontologies that distinguishes itself from other editors by supporting the linking of concepts between two ontologies, and providing sophisticated analysis and verification functions. In addition to the Gene Ontology and Open Biology Ontologies formats, COBrA can import and export ontologies in the Semantic Web formats RDF, RDFS and OWL.

• ontology or annotation browser

The Comparative Toxicogenomics Database (CTD) is a public database that enhances understanding about the effects of environmental chemicals on human health. Integrated GO data and a GO browser add functionality to CTD by allowing users to understand biological functions, processes and cellular locations that are the targets of chemical exposures.

• ontology or annotation browser

DynGO is a client-server application that provides several advanced functionalities in addition to the standard browsing capability. DynGO allows users to conduct batch retrieval of GO annotations for a list of genes and gene products, and semantic retrieval of genes and gene products sharing similar GO annotations (which requires more disk and memory to handle the semantic retrieval). The result are shown in an association tree organized according to GO hierarchies and supported with many dynamic display options such as sorting tree nodes or changing orientation of the tree. For GO curators and frequent GO users, DynGO provides fast and convenient access to GO annotation data. DynGO is generally applicable to any data set where the records are annotated with GO terms, as illustrated by two examples.

• ontology or annotation browser

Gene Class Expression allows functional annotation of SAGE data using the Gene Ontology database. This tool performs searches in the GO database for each SAGE tag, making associations in the selected GO category for a level selected in the hierarchy. This system provides user-friendly data navigation and visualization for mapping SAGE data onto the gene ontology structure. This tool also provides graphical visualization of the percentage of SAGE tags in each GO category, along with confidence intervals and hypothesis testing.

• ontology or annotation browser

GeneInfoViz is a web based tool for batch retrieval of gene function information, visualization of GO structure and construction of gene relation networks. It takes a input list of genes in the form of LocusLink ID, UniGeneID, gene symbol, or accession number and returns their functional genomic information. Based on the GO annotations of the given genes, GeneInfoViz allows users to visualize these genes in the DAG structure of GO, and construct a gene relation network at a selected level of the DAG.

• ontology or annotation browser

GenNav searches GO terms and annotated gene products, and provides a graphical display of a term's position in the GO DAG.

• ontology or annotation browser

The GOblet server performs analysis of sequences (cDNA, protein) with respect to GO terms. For similarity searches (BLAST), databases for various species are available, which were constructed using existing GO annotations. The server presents detailed descriptions of the matches and constructs a GO summary tree based on all GO terms of the respective hits.

• ontology or annotation browser

We developed a web application, GOfetcher, with a very comprehensive search facility for the GO project and a variety of output formats for the results. GOfetcher has three different levels for searching the GO: 'Quick Search', 'Advanced Search', and 'Upload Files' for searching. The application includes a unique search option which generates gene information given a nucleotide or protein accession number which can then be used in generating gene ontology information. The output data in GOfetcher can be saved into several different formats; including spreadsheet, comma-separated values, and the Extensible Markup Language (XML) format.

• ontology or annotation browser

The GoFish program, available as a Java applet online or to download, allows the user to construct arbitrary Boolean queries using GO attributes, and orders gene products according to the extent they satisfy such queries. GoFish also estimates, for each gene product, the probability that they satisfy the Boolean query.

• ontology or annotation browser

GOProfiler provides a summary of the GO annotations available in AgBase. The user provides a species (taxon id) and GOProfiler displays the number of GO associations and the number of annotated proteins for that species. The results are listed by evidence code and a separate list of unannotated proteins is also provided.

• ontology or annotation browser

Manatee is a web-based gene evaluation and genome annotation tool; Manatee can store and view annotation for prokaryotic and eukaryotic genomes. The Manatee interface allows biologists to quickly identify genes and make high quality functional assignments, such as GO classifications, using search data, paralogous families, and annotation suggestions generated from automated analysis. Manatee can be downloaded and installed to run under the CGI area of a web server, such as Apache.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation editor

The Ontology Evolution Explorer (OnEx) is a web-based system for exploring ontology changes. It provides access to several versions of 16 well-known life science ontologies including the Gene Ontology. The system is based on a three-tier architecture including an ontology version repository, a middleware component and the OnEX web application. Interactive workflows allow a systematic and explorative change analysis of ontologies and their concepts as well as the semi-automatic migration of out-dated annotations to the current version of an ontology.

• ontology or annotation browser

The Ontology Lookup Service (OLS) was created to integrate publicly available biomedical ontologies into a single database. All modified ontologies are updated daily. A list of currently loaded ontologies is available online. The database can be queried to obtain information on a single term or to browse a complete ontology using AJAX. Auto-completion provides a user-friendly search mechanism. An AJAX-based ontology viewer is available to browse a complete ontology or subsets of it. A programmatic interface is available to query the webservice using SOAP. The service is described by a WSDL descriptor file available online. A sample Java client to connect to the webservice using SOAP is available for download from SourceForge. All OLS source code is publicly available under the open source Apache Licence. The OLS provides a user-friendly single entry point for publicly available ontologies in the Open Biomedical Ontology (OBO) format.

• ontology or annotation browser
• ontology or annotation search engine

With PANDORA, you can search for any non-uniform sets of proteins and detect subsets of proteins that share unique biological properties and the intersections of such sets. PANDORA supports GO annotations as well as additional keywords (from UniProt Knowledgebase, InterPro, ENZYME, SCOP etc). It is also integrated into the ProtoNet system, thus allowing testing of thousands of automatically generated protein families. Note that PANDORA replaces the ProtoGO browser developed by the same group.

• ontology or annotation browser

TAIR Keyword Browser searches and browses for Gene Ontology, TAIR Anatomy, and TAIR Developmental stage terms, and allows you to view term details and relationships among terms. It includes links to genes, publications, microarray experiments and annotations associated with the term or any children terms.

• ontology or annotation browser

Tk-GO is a GUI wrapping the basic functions of the GO::AppHandle library from BDGP. GO terms are presented in an explorer-like browser, and behavior can be configured by altering Perl scripts. All available documentation is included in the download. Tk-GO uses the GO database (connects directly to the BDGP database by default) but is user-configurable.

• ontology or annotation browser

Wandora is a general purpose knowledge extraction, management, and publishing environment based on Topic Maps (ISO 13250). Wandora supports OBO flat file v1.2 format and can convert OBO files, including the Gene Ontology, to a topic map and vice versa. Wandora is well suited to OBO visualizations and knowledge mashups combining OBO, RDF(S), and Topic Map resources for example.
Wandora requires Java v6.

• ontology or annotation browser
• knowledge management system