基于GO体系的基因功能相似性度量方法

METRIC APPROACH FOR GENE FUNCTIONAL SIMILARITY BASED ON GENE ONTOLOGY

比较基因或基因产物功能上的相似性是生命科学研究的一项重要内容,它在生物大分子功能预测、基因聚类、生物网络分析和疾病相关基因筛选等方面具有广泛的应用。计算基因之间的功能相似性已经成为生物信息学研究的基础性工作。基因本体GO(Gene Ontology)体系集成了多种异质数据库的信息,用结构化的自然语言术语对基因和基因产物的功能进行注释和分类,是研究基因功能相似性的有力工具。从GO术语之间相似性、基因之间功能相似性两个方面,总结和评述过去十几年里,人类利用生物信息学方法在语义水平上研究基因功能相似性的进展和取得的成果,分析基因功能相似性计算方法存在的问题和面临的挑战,指出基于GO体系的基因功能相似性度量方法今后的主要研究方向。

Comparing the functional similarity of genes or gene products is an important content of life science research, which has a broad application in aspects such as function prediction for biomacromolecule, gene clustering, biological network analysis, disease related gene identification and so on. To calculate the functional similarity between genes has become the fundamental work in bioinformatics study. Gene Ontology （shorten as GO） is a powerful tool to study the functional similarity of genes by integrating the information from heterogeneous databases and annotating and classifying the functions of genes and gene products with structured natural language terminologies. In ＇this paper, we review and comment the progress in studying the gene functional similarity on semantic level the human being have been made in past decades by utilising the bioinformatics method as well as the achievements obtained from two aspects of similarity between GO terms and functional similarity between genes, analyse the problem existed in the calculation method of gene functional similarity and the challenges encountered, and then point out the major research direction in the future in regard to GO system-based metric approach for gene functional similarity.