The Gene Ontology and the Meaning of Biological Function.

The Gene Ontology (GO) provides a framework and set of concepts for describing the functions of gene products from all organisms. It is specifically designed for supporting the computational representation of biological systems. A GO annotation is an association between a specific gene product and a GO concept, together making a statement pertinent to the function of that gene. However, the meaning of the term "function" is not as straightforward as it might seem, and has been discussed at length in both philosophical and biological circles. Here, I first review these discussions. I then present an explicit formulation of the biological model that underlies the GO and annotations, and discuss how this model relates to the broader debates on the meaning of biological function.

• Publication year

  2017

• Venue

  Methods in molecular biology

• Publication date

  Unknown publication date

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Philosophy, Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1007/978-1-4939-3743-1_2PMID 27812932PMCID PMC6438694
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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