TopoICSim: a new semantic similarity measure based on gene ontology.

Journal: BMC bioinformatics
Published Date:

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The Gene Ontology (GO) is a dynamic, controlled vocabulary that describes the cellular function of genes and proteins according to tree major categories: biological process, molecular function and cellular component. It has become widely used in many bioinformatics applications for annotating genes and measuring their semantic similarity, rather than their sequence similarity. Generally speaking, semantic similarity measures involve the GO tree topology, information content of GO terms, or a combination of both.

Authors

  • Rezvan Ehsani
    Department of Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 8905, NO-7491, Trondheim, Norway.
  • Finn Drabløs
    Department of Cancer Research and Molecular Medicine, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 8905, NO-7491, Trondheim, Norway. finn.drablos@ntnu.no.