TO-GO: A java-based gene ontology navigation environment

Abstract

TO-GO is a Gene Ontology (GO) navigation tool, which is implemented as a Java application. After the initial data downloading, the GO term tree can be interactively navigated without further network transfer. Local annotation can be incorporated. It supports querying by GO terms or associated gene product information, displaying the result as a table or a sub-tree. The result from the search for a set of external database accessions includes the number of gene products associated with each node, inclusive of sub-nodes. Search results can be further processed by set operations and these set operations can be quite useful for expression profile data analysis. A copy/paste function is also implemented in order to facilitate data exchange between applications.