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In general, these tools accept as input a target set of genes that is compared to a given background set of genes, or to a default "complete" background set. For example, enriched GO terms in a set of genes that are significantly over-expressed in a specific condition may suggest possible mechanisms of regulation that are put into play, or functional pathways that are activated in that condition.Ī large repertoire of tools for enrichment analysis has been developed in recent years, including GoMiner, FatiGO, BiNGO, GOAT, DAVID and others. Enrichment may suggest possible functional characteristics of the given set. One of the most common applications of the GO vocabulary is enrichment analysis – the identification of GO terms that are significantly overrepresented in a given set of genes. A comprehensive list of available tools is provided at the Gene Ontology web site. Since its inception, many tools have been developed to explore, filter and search the GO database. The building blocks of GO are terms, the relationship between which can be described by a directed acyclic graph (DAG), a hierarchy in which each gene product may be annotated to one or more terms in each ontology. GO consists of three hierarchically structured vocabularies (ontologies) that describe gene products in terms of their associated biological processes, cellular components and molecular functions. The Gene Ontology (GO) project is a collaborative effort aimed at providing a controlled vocabulary to describe gene product attributes in all organisms. Automatic mining of these data for meaningful biological signals requires systematic annotation of genomic elements at different levels.
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The availability of functional genomics data has increased dramatically over the last decade, mostly due to the development of high-throughput microarray-based technologies such as expression profiling.
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GOrilla's unique features and advantages over other threshold free enrichment tools include rigorous statistics, fast running time and an effective graphical representation. GOrilla is an efficient GO analysis tool with unique features that make a useful addition to the existing repertoire of GO enrichment tools. The output of the enrichment analysis is visualized as a hierarchical structure, providing a clear view of the relations between enriched GO terms. This enables rigorous statistical analysis of thousand of genes and thousands of GO terms in order of seconds. Building on a complete theoretical characterization of the underlying distribution, called mHG, GOrilla computes an exact p-value for the observed enrichment, taking threshold multiple testing into account without the need for simulations. GOrilla employs a flexible threshold statistical approach to discover GO terms that are significantly enriched at the top of a ranked gene list. by level of expression or of differential expression). This is particularly useful in many typical cases where genomic data may be naturally represented as a ranked list of genes (e.g. GOrilla is a web-based application that identifies enriched GO terms in ranked lists of genes, without requiring the user to provide explicit target and background sets. The latter typically rely on simulations or on union-bound correction for assigning statistical significance to the results. A few tools also exist that support analyzing ranked lists.
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Most of these tools require as input a target set of genes and a background set and seek enrichment in the target set compared to the background set. In particular, a variety of tools that perform GO enrichment analysis are currently available. Since the inception of the GO annotation project, a variety of tools have been developed that support exploring and searching the GO database.
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