Welcome to the final newsletter in the series. The Kidney Research UK funded Renal GO Annotation Initiative has now ended and the aims of the initiative have been achieved in providing the biomedical research community with an information-rich resource, which can be used to assist the rapid evaluation of new experimental data. A process-specific approach has led to improvements to both the ontology to describe renal processes (in particular, renal system development) and to the annotation of renal-specific gene products.

Due to an electrical upgrade in building 64 at LBNL, from Friday (3/9) 5:30pm PST until Sunday (3/11) morning the following services will be unavailable:

We are pleased to announce the publication of our latest paper, a collaboration between the UCL-based Cardiovascular Gene Ontology Annotation Initiative (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/cardiovasculargeneontology/) and the UniProt-GOA Renal Gene Ontology Initiative (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/GOA/kidney/), which describes the benefit of performing focused annotation on proteins implicated in specific organ development and function. We show that such annotation efforts lead to improved interpretation of results from cardiovascular-related microarray datasets.

A preview of PomBase, the new model organism database for the fission yeast Schizosaccharomyces pombe, has been announced to the S. pombe community for testing and feedback. PomBase contributes annotations for fission yeast to the GO repository; for more information, see the NAR Database Issue paper (PubMed abstract) or contact the PomBase staff.