October 26, 2015
Our GO Term Finder tool lets you start with a list of genes—perhaps a set of genes that are co-regulated, or a group of genes that can all mutate to the same phenotype—and analyze their Gene Ontology (GO) annotations to find out what else they might have in common. GO Term Finder searches for significantly shared terms within the GO annotations associated with the genes in your list. It takes advantage of the tree structure of GO to find terms that are related to each other within the ontology.
Finding shared terms within a gene set can bring meaning to experimental results and suggest new avenues to explore. For example, if the GO Term Finder results show that most of the genes in your co-regulated set mediate steps in a pathway, this might be a hint that the uncharacterized genes in the set also participate in that pathway. Or perhaps GO Term Finder will show that a group of genes that can mutate to confer resistance to a certain drug are all annotated to a certain cellular location, suggesting a mechanism for the effects of that drug. Give it a try and see what interesting results your gene list has in store!
Our new SGD Help video gives you a quick overview of how to use the GO Term Finder. You can find all the details on our GO Term Finder help page.
Categories: Tutorial
Tags: Gene Ontology, GO Term Finder, video