It would be impossible to list all the potential applications of GO, but applications for which GO has already been used include the following:
- integrating proteomic information from different organisms;
- assigning functions to protein domains;
- finding functional similarities in genes that are overexpressed or underexpressed in diseases and as we age;
- predicting the likelihood that a particular gene is involved in diseases that haven’t yet been mapped to specific genes;
- analysing groups of genes that are co-expressed during development;
- developing automated ways of deriving information about gene function from the literature;
- verifying models of genetic, metabolic and product interaction networks.
For references to these and other studies that have used GO, see the GO and the scientific literature page.