My first GeneOntology term!!

Today the maintainers of the GeneOntology database have accepted a term that I had proposed two days earlier. Therefore, since today I am the daddy of ‘integral to lumenal side of endoplasmic reticulum membrane‘ (GO:0071556)!!! 🙂

logo of the GeneOntology project
logo of the GeneOntology project

GeneOntology is a database of terms used to describe the functions and the properties of proteins and objects of biological interest. It is like an ufficial and structured vocabolary, which you can use when you describe a protein to be sure that there it will be no misunderstanding on what you are saying.

Proposing a term to GeneOntology is very easy and quick, and the maintainers answer quite quickly. The only thing you have to do is to go to their bug tracker on sourceforge and provide the few informations that they require (see the instructions).  As I said before, it tooks only 2 days for them to accept my proposal, but my term was kind of a special case and it was clear that it was necessary to add it.

While the process to add GO term is quick and efficient, I think that they should improve their annotations for genes a bit. In fact there are a lot of GO terms which seems to be not associated with any gene, for example this one (which is some way similar to the gene that I have just proposed).

Moreover, sometimes it is difficult to navigate the GeneOntology tree itself: if you look again at GO:0071458, and look at the tree in the lower part of the page, you see that the term is repeated several times (because it belongs to several higher-level terms), and the representation is correct but a bit intimidating at first.

So, hurrá for GeneOntology… if in the future you will ever work with something which is ‘integral to lumenal side of endoplasmic reticulum membrane’, be it either a gene or another molecule, I hope it will remind you of me… 🙂

p.s. this is the full story about my term.

5 Comments

  1. Congratulations on your new term.
    It´s a pity that I cannot use “integral to lumenal side of endoplasmic reticulum membrane” in my daily conversation.

    1. Thanks!! If it is better for you, I am going to submit ‘ER Quality Control Compartment (ERQC)’ soon, it looks more colloquial.

  2. Congratulations.

    The CC ontology is not so comprehensive as BP and MF does, and needs more efforts to improve and maintain.

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