Investigating “Gene Ontology”-based semantic similarity in the context of functional genomics

Dani Welter, PhD student, COMSC10-12-2010

The project

• Development of a grouping algorithm that incorporates both GO terms and gene products.

• Using existing semantic and functional similarity approaches to group gene products based on their GO annotation

Aims

• Identification of functionally related gene products with respect to the functional aspect that they are related on

• Exploitation of functional annotation data independently of other forms of biological similarity

Difference to existing approaches

• Gene products can be in multiple groups less restrictive than most clustering approaches

• Takes into account that a gene product can have multiple functional relationships with other gene products