GO Gene Ontology
----------------

The GO collaborators are developing three structured, controlled
vocabularies (ontologies) that describe gene products in terms of
their associated biological processes, cellular components and
molecular functions in a species-independent manner.
There are three separate aspects to this effort: first,
we write and maintain the ontologies themselves; second,
we make associations between the ontologies and the genes and
gene products in the collaborating databases, and third,
we develop tools that facilitate the creation, maintainence and
use of ontologies.


The three organizing principles of GO are molecular function,
biological process and cellular component. A gene product has
one or more molecular functions and is used in one or more
biological processes; it might be associated with one or more
cellular components. For example,the gene product cytochrome c can
be described by the molecular function term electron
transporter activity, the biological process terms oxidative
phosphorylation and induction of cell death, and the cellular
component terms mitochondrial matrix and mitochondrial inner
membrane.