DNA Day is a celebration of the work of Franklin, Wilkins, Crick & Watson, published on this day in 1953. April is also the month the Human Genome Project (HGP) was declared complete, in 2003.
But did you know that several of the people responsible for the HGP are also deeply involved in GO?
David Botstein et al. laid down the framework for constructing genetic linkage maps using restriction fragment length polymorphisms in 1980. That work helped enable sequencing for the HGP. Some years later, Dr. Botstein founded the Saccharomyces Genome Database with Michael Cherry, and GO was created out of the collaboration of SGD, FlyBase, and MGI. Dr. Botstein was a co-authour on the first official GO paper, Gene ontology: tool for the unification of biology.
Another critical member of GO that worked on the HGP is Paul Thomas, who had a crucial role in publishing the HGP paper The sequence of the human genome in Science in 2001. Currently, Dr. Thomas is one of the PIs for GO, and you can find the latest GO paper in Genetics: The Gene Ontology knowledgebase in 2023.
The availability of the complete human genome allows the GO to provide functional annotations for humans. Find the latest GO annotations for Homo sapiens: Download Annotations | Gene Ontology Consortium.