GOblet: Annotation of anonymous sequence data with Gene Ontology and Pathway terms

Abstract

The functional annotation of genomic data has become a major task for the ever-growing number of sequencing projects. In order to address this challenge, we recently developed GOblet, a free web service for the annotation of anonymous sequences with Gene Ontology (GO) terms. However, to overcome limitations of the GO terminology, and to aid in understanding not only single components but as well systemic interactions between the individual components, we have now extended the GOblet web service to integrate also pathway annotations. Furthermore, we extended and upgraded the data analysis pipeline with improved summaries, and added term enrichment and clustering algorithms. Finally, we are now making GOblet available as a stand-alone application for high-throughput processing on local machines. The advantages of this frequently requested feature is that a) the user can avoid restrictions of our web service for uploading and processing large amounts of data, and that b) confidential data can be analysed without insecure transfer to a public web server. The stand-alone version of the web service has been implemented using platform independent Tcl-scripts, which can be run with just a single runtime file utilizing the Starkit technology. The GOblet web service and the stand-alone application are freely available at http://goblet.molgen.mpg.de.