The Gene Ontology and the meaning of biological function
By Paul D. Thomas. 2017
237 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The Gene Ontology (GO) provides a framework and set of concepts for describing the functions of gene products from all organisms. It is specifically designed for supporting the computational representation of biological systems. A GO annotation is an association between a specific gene product and a GO concept, together making a statement pertinent to the function of that gene. However, the meaning of the term “function” is not as straightforward as it might seem, and has been discussed at length in both philosophical and biological circles. Here, I first review these discussions. I then present an explicit formulation of the biological model that underlies the GO and annotations, and discuss how this model relates to the broader debates on the meaning of biological function.
Subfields: Molecular Biology
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In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- The Gene Ontology Resource: 20 years and still GOing strong (2018, background): “In the GO molecular function refactoring, we recognized that, while specific binding events are an essential mechanism by which gene products function, an individual binding activity is almost never sufficient in itself to describe molecular function in a larger biological context (25).”