%0 Journal Article
%T EasyGO: Gene Ontology-based annotation and functional enrichment analysis tool for agronomical species
%A Xin Zhou
%A Zhen Su
%J BMC Genomics
%D 2007
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2164-8-246
%X This paper presents EasyGO, a web server to perform Gene Ontology based functional interpretation on groups of genes or GeneChip probe sets. EasyGO makes a special contribution to the agronomical research community by supporting Affymetrix GeneChips of both crops and farm animals and by providing stronger capabilities for results visualization and user interaction. Currently it supports 11 agronomical plants, 3 farm animals, and the model plant Arabidopsis. The authors demonstrated EasyGO's ability to uncover hidden knowledge by analyzing a group of probe sets with similar expression profiles.EasyGO is a good tool for helping biologists and agricultural scientists to discover enriched biological knowledge that can provide solutions or suggestions for original problems. It is freely available to all users at http://bioinformatics.cau.edu.cn/easygo/ webcite.High-throughput technologies such as microarray techniques can study thousands of biological entities simultaneously. Extracting the important biological facts from the results of such experiments is of crucial importance, but has proven difficult for experimental biologists. To solve this problem, a systemized annotation vocabulary describing biological knowledge and tools to uncover hidden knowledge automatically using such a vocabulary are required. The Gene Ontology (GO) annotation system [1] can meet this requirement by providing a set of expert-curated terms describing biological entities in three aspects (biological process, molecular function, and cellular component) organized into a hierarchical structure. Genes and microarray probe sets could be associated with certain GO terms according to the biological functions they perform or represent, and enriched terms in a GO-annotated list of genes or probe sets could be used to characterize biological "theme" in the list. Many software and web servers have been developed for this purpose and are summarized in a recent paper [2]. However, from the vantage point
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/8/246