Plant and Animal Genome XXI Conference

January 11 - 16, 2013

Applications of Ontologies to Plant and Animal Genomics

Recent advances in sequencing technologies have led to a windfall of data in the fields of genomics, gene expression analysis, and phenomics with new species being added rapidly. Analyses of these vast datasets have the potential to improve our understanding of the molecular basis of phenotypes, development and species evolution. Effective inter-specific comparisons at the genome scale demand a common vocabulary (ontology), structured in a way that permits computer-aided reasoning about relationships among different kinds of entities. Thus, ontologies have become indispensable tools for data curation and analysis in the life sciences. The Gene Ontology and the Plant Ontology, along with others, are being used for the systematic annotation or ‘tagging’ of data: documenting associations between genes, gene products, or sequences and the structures or processes to which they contribute. These annotations facilitate computerized searching and reasoning over large datasets from multiple sources, allowing researchers to address questions in comparative genetics, development, and genomics. The goals of the workshop are to introduce the audience to the possibilities that ontologies present when dealing with large plant or animal datasets and how ontologies can be used to find novel insights in the massive amounts of genomics data becoming available.