Modularization for the Cell Ontology

One of the premises of the OBO Foundry is that development of an orthogonal set of ontologies will increase domain expert contributions and logical interoperability, and decrease maintenance workload. For these reasons, the Cell Ontology (CL) is being re-engineered. This process requires the extraction of sub-modules from existing OBO ontologies, which presents a number of practical engineering challenges. These extracted modules may be intended to cover a narrow or a broad set of species. In addition, applications and resources that make use of the Cell Ontology have particular modularization requirements, such as the ability to extract custom subsets or unions of the Cell Ontology with other OBO ontologies. These extracted modules may be intended to cover a narrow or a broad set of species, which presents unique complications.

We discuss some of these requirements, and present our progress towards a customizable simple-to-use modularization tool that leverages existing OWL-based tools and opens up their use for the CL and other ontologies

FlyBase: enhancing Drosophila Gene Ontology annotations

FlyBase (http://flybase.org) is a database of Drosophila genetic and genomic information. Gene Ontology (GO) terms are used to describe three attributes of wild-type gene products: their molecular function, the biological processes in which they play a role, and their subcellular location. This article describes recent changes to the FlyBase GO annotation strategy that are improving the quality of the GO annotation data. Many of these changes stem from our participation in the GO Reference Genome Annotation Project—a multi-database collaboration producing comprehensive GO annotation sets for 12 diverse species

Guidelines for the functional annotation of microRNAs using the Gene Ontology

MicroRNA regulation of developmental and cellular processes is a relatively new field of study, and the available research data have not been organized to enable its inclusion in pathway and network analysis tools. The association of gene products with terms from the Gene Ontology is an effective method to analyze functional data, but until recently there has been no substantial effort dedicated to applying Gene Ontology terms to microRNAs. Consequently, when performing functional analysis of microRNA data sets, researchers have had to rely instead on the functional annotations associated with the genes encoding microRNA targets. In consultation with experts in the field of microRNA research, we have created comprehensive recommendations for the Gene Ontology curation of microRNAs. This curation manual will enable provision of a high-quality, reliable set of functional annotations for the advancement of microRNA research. Here we describe the key aspects of the work, including development of the Gene Ontology to represent this data, standards for describing the data, and guidelines to support curators making these annotations. The full microRNA curation guidelines are available on the GO Consortium wiki (http://wiki.geneontology.org/index.php/MicroRNA_GO_annotation_manual)

Improving Interpretation of Cardiac Phenotypes and Enhancing Discovery With Expanded Knowledge in the Gene Ontology

This work was funded through grants from the British Heart Foundation (BHF, SP/07/007/23671, RG/13/5/30112) and the National Institute for Health Research University College London Hospitals Biomedical Research Centre; The Zebrafish Model Organism Database: National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI, HG002659, HG004838, HG004834); The Rat Genome Database: National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute on behalf of the NIH (HL64541); The Mouse Genome Database: NGHRI (HG003300); FlyBase: UK Medical Research Council (G1000968); and Gene Ontology Consortium: NIH NHGRI (U41 HG002273) to Drs Blake, Cherry, Lewis, Sternberg, and Thomas. Professor Riley received BHF personal chair award (CH/11/1/28798). Professors Lambiase and Tinker received support from BHF and UK Medical Research Council. Professor Tinker received National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre at Barts and BHF grant (RG/15/15/31742). Dr Roncaglia received EMBL-EBI Core funds

Improving Interpretation of Cardiac Phenotypes and Enhancing Discovery With Expanded Knowledge in the Gene Ontology.

BACKGROUND: A systems biology approach to cardiac physiology requires a comprehensive representation of how coordinated processes operate in the heart, as well as the ability to interpret relevant transcriptomic and proteomic experiments. The Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium provides structured, controlled vocabularies of biological terms that can be used to summarize and analyze functional knowledge for gene products. METHODS AND RESULTS: In this study, we created a computational resource to facilitate genetic studies of cardiac physiology by integrating literature curation with attention to an improved and expanded ontological representation of heart processes in the Gene Ontology. As a result, the Gene Ontology now contains terms that comprehensively describe the roles of proteins in cardiac muscle cell action potential, electrical coupling, and the transmission of the electrical impulse from the sinoatrial node to the ventricles. Evaluating the effectiveness of this approach to inform data analysis demonstrated that Gene Ontology annotations, analyzed within an expanded ontological context of heart processes, can help to identify candidate genes associated with arrhythmic disease risk loci. CONCLUSIONS: We determined that a combination of curation and ontology development for heart-specific genes and processes supports the identification and downstream analysis of genes responsible for the spread of the cardiac action potential through the heart. Annotating these genes and processes in a structured format facilitates data analysis and supports effective retrieval of gene-centric information about cardiac defects. Circ Genom Precis Med 2018 Feb; 11(2):e001813

Guidelines for the functional annotation of microRNAs using the Gene Ontology

ABSTRACT MicroRNA regulation of developmental and cellular processes is a relatively new field of study, and the available research data have not been organized to enable its inclusion in pathway and network analysis tools. The association of gene products with terms from the Gene Ontology is an effective method to analyze functional data, but until recently there has been no substantial effort dedicated to applying Gene Ontology terms to microRNAs. Consequently, when performing functional analysis of microRNA data sets, researchers have had to rely instead on the functional annotations associated with the genes encoding microRNA targets. In consultation with experts in the field of microRNA research, we have created comprehensive recommendations for the Gene Ontology curation of microRNAs. This curation manual will enable provision of a high-quality, reliable set of functional annotations for the advancement of microRNA research. Here we describe the key aspects of the work, including development of the Gene Ontology to represent this data, standards for describing the data, and guidelines to support curators making these annotations. The full microRNA curation guidelines are available on the GO Consortium wiki (http://wiki.geneontology.org/index.php/MicroRNA_GO_annotation_manual)

The Monarch Initiative in 2019: an integrative data and analytic platform connecting phenotypes to genotypes across species.

In biology and biomedicine, relating phenotypic outcomes with genetic variation and environmental factors remains a challenge: patient phenotypes may not match known diseases, candidate variants may be in genes that haven’t been characterized, research organisms may not recapitulate human or veterinary diseases, environmental factors affecting disease outcomes are unknown or undocumented, and many resources must be queried to find potentially significant phenotypic associations. The Monarch Initiative (https://monarchinitiative.org) integrates information on genes, variants, genotypes, phenotypes and diseases in a variety of species, and allows powerful ontology-based search. We develop many widely adopted ontologies that together enable sophisticated computational analysis, mechanistic discovery and diagnostics of Mendelian diseases. Our algorithms and tools are widely used to identify animal models of human disease through phenotypic similarity, for differential diagnostics and to facilitate translational research. Launched in 2015, Monarch has grown with regards to data (new organisms, more sources, better modeling); new API and standards; ontologies (new Mondo unified disease ontology, improvements to ontologies such as HPO and uPheno); user interface (a redesigned website); and community development. Monarch data, algorithms and tools are being used and extended by resources such as GA4GH and NCATS Translator, among others, to aid mechanistic discovery and diagnostics

A Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM).

Despite progress in the development of standards for describing and exchanging scientific information, the lack of easy-to-use standards for mapping between different representations of the same or similar objects in different databases poses a major impediment to data integration and interoperability. Mappings often lack the metadata needed to be correctly interpreted and applied. For example, are two terms equivalent or merely related? Are they narrow or broad matches? Or are they associated in some other way? Such relationships between the mapped terms are often not documented, which leads to incorrect assumptions and makes them hard to use in scenarios that require a high degree of precision (such as diagnostics or risk prediction). Furthermore, the lack of descriptions of how mappings were done makes it hard to combine and reconcile mappings, particularly curated and automated ones. We have developed the Simple Standard for Sharing Ontological Mappings (SSSOM) which addresses these problems by: (i) Introducing a machine-readable and extensible vocabulary to describe metadata that makes imprecision, inaccuracy and incompleteness in mappings explicit. (ii) Defining an easy-to-use simple table-based format that can be integrated into existing data science pipelines without the need to parse or query ontologies, and that integrates seamlessly with Linked Data principles. (iii) Implementing open and community-driven collaborative workflows that are designed to evolve the standard continuously to address changing requirements and mapping practices. (iv) Providing reference tools and software libraries for working with the standard. In this paper, we present the SSSOM standard, describe several use cases in detail and survey some of the existing work on standardizing the exchange of mappings, with the goal of making mappings Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR). The SSSOM specification can be found at http://w3id.org/sssom/spec. Database URL: http://w3id.org/sssom/spec