The Gene Ontology and the scientific literature
The scientific literature and the Gene Ontology depend on each other: the literature is the source of GO annotations, and GO is used throughout biomedical research.
Current numbers are on the GO release statistics page.
GO is built from the literature
GO annotations are fundamentally based on the scientific literature. Every individual assertion in the Gene Ontology knowledgebase cites the original information justifying that assertion, and the core of these annotations are those determined through direct experimentation. Currently, the GO includes experimental findings from over 180,000 published papers, represented as over 1,000,000 experimentally supported annotations. These provide the central dataset for additional inference of functional annotations, including over 3 million annotations based on phylogeny. Our official downloadable annotation files cover about 170 organisms spanning the tree of life, nearly all with over 1,000 annotations each. EMBL-EBI’s QuickGO provides GO annotations for many more species and currently holds over 500 million annotations.
The literature uses GO
Reciprocally, the GO knowledgebase plays a critical role in furthering biomedical research. GO is referenced in over 159,000 scientific papers. The major uses of the GO are listed below. Each link opens a Europe PMC search for the associated publications: