Description
The Gene Ontology (GO) Consortium organizes genes
into hierarchical categories based on biological process (BP), molecular function (MF) and
cellular component (CC, i.e., subcellular localization). Tools such as 'GoMiner' (see Zeeberg, B.R.,
Feng, W., Wang, G. et al. (2003) ) can leverage GO to perform
ontological analysis of microarray and proteomics studies, typically generating a list of
significant functional categories. The significance is traditionally determined by randomizing
the input gene list to computing the false discovery rate (FDR) of the enrichment p-value for
each category. We explore here the novel alternative of randomizing the GO database rather than
the gene list.