Cell ontology

A new ‘network-extracted ontology’ model of the cell

Turning vast amounts of genomic data into meaningful information about the cell is the great challenge of bioinformatics, with major implications for human biology and medicine

December 20, 2012

Part of the network-extracted ontology (NeXO) hierarchical ontology of genes, cellular components, and processes derived from large genomic datasets. The ontology is shown as a tree, with nodes indicating terms and edges indicating hierarchical relations between terms. Node sizes indicate the number of genes assigned to a term. Node colors represent the degree of correspondence to a term in the manually curated Gene Ontology (GO) as determined by ontology alignment, with high-level alignments labeled. (Credit: UC San Diego School of Medicine)

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine and colleagues have proposed a new “network-extracted ontology” (NeXO) method that creates a computational model of the cell from large networks of gene and protein interactions, discovering how genes and proteins connect to form higher-level cellular machinery./.../