A new gene ontology-based measure for the functional similarity of gene products.
- Author:
Guo-Long QI
1
;
Shi-Yu QIAN
;
Ji-Qian FANG
Author Information
- Publication Type:Journal Article
- MeSH: Gene Ontology; Protein Binding
- From: Chinese Medical Journal 2013;126(18):3561-3566
- CountryChina
- Language:English
-
Abstract:
BACKGROUNDAlthough biomedical ontologies have standardized the representation of gene products across species and databases, a method for determining the functional similarities of gene products has not yet been developed.
METHODSWe proposed a new semantic similarity measure based on Gene Ontology that considers the semantic influences from all of the ancestor terms in a graph. Our measure was compared with Resnik's measure in two applications, which were based on the association of the measure used with the gene co-expression and the protein-protein interactions.
RESULTSThe results showed a considerable association between the semantic similarity and the expression correlation and between the semantic similarity and the protein-protein interactions, and our measure performed the best overall.
CONCLUSIONThese results revealed the potential value of our newly proposed semantic similarity measure in studying the functional relevance of gene products.