Title
Measuring gene functional similarity based on group-wise comparison of GO terms.
Abstract
Compared with sequence and structure similarity, functional similarity is more informative for understanding the biological roles and functions of genes. Many important applications in computational molecular biology require functional similarity, such as gene clustering, protein function prediction, protein interaction evaluation and disease gene prioritization. Gene Ontology (GO) is now widely used as the basis for measuring gene functional similarity. Some existing methods combined semantic similarity scores of single term pairs to estimate gene functional similarity, whereas others compared terms in groups to measure it. However, these methods may make error-prone judgments about gene functional similarity. It remains a challenge that measuring gene functional similarity reliably.We propose a novel method called SORA to measure gene functional similarity in GO context. First of all, SORA computes the information content (IC) of a term making use of semantic specificity and coverage. Second, SORA measures the IC of a term set by means of combining inherited and extended IC of the terms based on the structure of GO. Finally, SORA estimates gene functional similarity using the IC overlap ratio of term sets. SORA is evaluated against five state-of-the-art methods in the file on the public platform for collaborative evaluation of GO-based semantic similarity measure. The carefully comparisons show SORA is superior to other methods in general. Further analysis suggests that it primarily benefits from the structure of GO, which implies expressive information about gene function. SORA offers an effective and reliable way to compare gene function.The web service of SORA is freely available at http://nclab.hit.edu.cn/SORA/
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1093/bioinformatics/btt160
Bioinformatics
Keywords
Field
DocType
functional similarity,gene function,extended ic,disease gene prioritization,semantic similarity score,group-wise comparison,gene clustering,go-based semantic similarity measure,gene functional similarity,single term pair,structure similarity
Semantic similarity,Data mining,Gene,Computational molecular biology,Computer science,Gene ontology,Prioritization,Bioinformatics,Cluster analysis,Protein function prediction
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
29
11
1367-4811
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
32
0.89
36
Authors
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Zhixia Teng1342.26
Mao-Zu Guo252653.96
Xiaoyan Liu3455.91
Qiguo Dai4412.83
Chunyu Wang5385.72
Ping Xuan640932.37