WEGO

WEGO visualizes and compares Gene Ontology (GO) annotation results to display distributions of gene functions across GO categories.

Key Features:

• Visualization of GO annotations: WEGO plots the distribution of Gene Ontology (GO) annotations as histograms to represent functional categorization of genes.
• Directed Acyclic Graph handling: WEGO accounts for the directed acyclic graph (DAG) structure of the Gene Ontology to preserve hierarchical relationships among GO terms.
• Comparative analysis: WEGO enables comparison of different gene annotation datasets by presenting side-by-side GO term distribution profiles.

Scientific Applications:

• Genome project analysis: Applied to large-scale projects including the rice genome project and the silkworm genome project to summarize GO annotation distributions.
• Comparative genomics: Used to identify functional similarities and differences across multiple gene annotation datasets via GO distribution comparisons.
• Downstream gene annotation analysis: Supports downstream interpretation of genomic datasets to elucidate functional insights from GO annotations.

Methodology:

WEGO parses GO annotation results using vocabularies from the GO Consortium, accounts for the Gene Ontology DAG structure, and transforms annotations into histograms representing distributions of gene functions.