Unification of multi-species vertebrate anatomy ontologies for comparative biology in Uberon
- Oregon Health and Science Univ., Portland, OR (United States). Dept. of Medical Informatics and Epidemiology
- Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC (United States). Dept. of Biology; National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, NC (United States)
- Univ. of Lausanne (Switzerland). Dept. of Ecology and Evolution; Swiss Inst. of Bioformatics, Lausanne (Switzerland)
- California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, CA (United States). Dept. of Vertebrate Zoology and Anthropology
- The Jackson Lab., Bar Harbor, ME (United States)
- Univ. of Oregon, Eugene, OR (United States). The Zebrafish Model Organism Database
- National Evolutionary Synthesis Center, Durham, NC (United States); Univ. of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD (United States). Dept. of Biology
- Univ. of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD (United States). Dept. of Biology
- Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States). Dept. of Oral Biology
- Univ. of Chicago, IL (United States). Dept. of Organismal Biology and Anatomy
- Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
Background: Elucidating disease and developmental dysfunction requires understanding variation in phenotype. Single-species model organism anatomy ontologies (ssAOs) have been established to represent this variation. Multi-species anatomy ontologies (msAOs; vertebrate skeletal, vertebrate homologous, teleost, amphibian AOs) have been developed to represent ‘natural’ phenotypic variation across species. Our aim has been to integrate ssAOs and msAOs for various purposes, including establishing links between phenotypic variation and candidate genes. Results: Previously, msAOs contained a mixture of unique and overlapping content. This hampered integration and coordination due to the need to maintain cross-references or inter-ontology equivalence axioms to the ssAOs, or to perform large-scale obsolescence and modular import. Here we present the unification of anatomy ontologies into Uberon, a single ontology resource that enables interoperability among disparate data and research groups. As a consequence, independent development of TAO, VSAO, AAO, and vHOG has been discontinued. Conclusions: The newly broadened Uberon ontology is a unified cross-taxon resource for metazoans (animals) that has been substantially expanded to include a broad diversity of vertebrate anatomical structures, permitting reasoning across anatomical variation in extinct and extant taxa. Uberon is a core resource that supports single- and cross-species queries for candidate genes using annotations for phenotypes from the systematics, biodiversity, medical, and model organism communities, while also providing entities for logical definitions in the Cell and Gene Ontologies. The ontology release files associated with the ontology merge described in this manuscript are available at: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/uberon/releases/2013-02-21/ Current ontology release files are available always available at: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/uberon/releases/
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC), Biological and Environmental Research (BER). Biological Systems Science Division
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 1626677
- Journal Information:
- Journal of Biomedical Semantics, Vol. 5, Issue 1; ISSN 2041-1480
- Publisher:
- BioMed CentralCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
The Cell Ontology 2016: enhanced content, modularization, and ontology interoperability
Uberon, an integrative multi-species anatomy ontology