I have been participating in the annotation of the human genome for 23 years and now lead an annotation team based at UCL, which has submitted around 9% of the manual Gene Ontology annotations associated with human genes. Gene Ontology (GO) is the de facto standard to describe the biological function of genes and is the most widely used biomedical ontology. In addition, my team also contributes protein interaction data to the IMEx Consortium. Our annotations are made publically available, through our close collaboration with the European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, and have been propagated through the world’s leading biological databases, including Ensembl and NCBI Gene, and even to Wikipedia.
The work undertaken by my group enables us to align gene curation with the expertise available at UCL, providing a unique curation approach. In addition, we have carried out several functional analyses of high-throughput datasets, which demonstrate that the annotations we create have a significant impact on data interpretation. The importance of these annotations is now recognised by disease-focused grant bodies, including the British Heart Foundation, Parkinson’s UK, Alzheimer’s Research UK and Kidney Research UK, the first three of which have provided funding that enabled me to expand the annotation team at UCL to 4 biocurators. I am an active member of the Gene Ontology Consortium.
I have been participating in the annotation of the human genome for 23 years and now lead an annotation team based at UCL, which has submitted around 9% of the manual Gene Ontology annotations associated with human genes. Gene Ontology (GO) is the de facto standard to describe the biological function of genes and is the most widely used biomedical ontology. In addition, my team also contributes protein interaction data to the IMEx Consortium. Our annotations are made publically available, through our close collaboration with the European Bioinformatics Institute, Hinxton, and have been propagated through the world’s leading biological databases, including Ensembl and NCBI Gene, and even to Wikipedia.
The work undertaken by my group enables us to align gene curation with the expertise available at UCL, providing a unique curation approach. In addition, we have carried out several functional analyses of high-throughput datasets, which demonstrate that the annotations we create have a significant impact on data interpretation. The importance of these annotations is now recognised by disease-focused grant bodies, including the British Heart Foundation, Parkinson’s UK, Alzheimer’s Research UK and Kidney Research UK, the first three of which have provided funding that enabled me to expand the annotation team at UCL to 4 biocurators. I am an active member of the Gene Ontology Consortium.