Major bioinformatics initiative maintaining a comprehensive computational model of gene and gene product attributes.

The Gene Ontology Consortium is a major bioinformatics initiative that develops and maintains the Gene Ontology (GO), a comprehensive computational representation of gene and gene product attributes across all species. The Consortium maintains and develops its controlled vocabulary of gene and gene product attributes, annotates genes and gene products, and provides tools for accessing all aspects of the data. The Gene Ontology is one of the most widely used ontologies in the life sciences, organizing biological knowledge into three domains: molecular function, biological process, and cellular component.